


A Normal Year

by threesmallcrows



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, Gunshot Wounds, M/M, Organized Crime, Pining, this is just 3 sex scenes in a trench coat pretending to be a plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2020-10-24 12:24:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20705972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: After Matt had reunited with Mello, he was beyond relieved that Mello wanted to sleep with him.He didn’t know what the fuck he’d have done if Mello refused him—beat off until his dick chafed off? Fuck off and be by himself again? And then what, kill himself?The thing was, nobody actually wanted to hear, “I’d die for you.” It was romantic in theory, but very, very unsexy in practice.





	1. North Dakota I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Matt had reunited with Mello, he was beyond relieved that Mello wanted to sleep with him.

Winter in North Dakota was fucking miserable. Who had ever heard of a place where a person’s goddamn eyelashes froze?

Although Mello didn’t mind it. He’d come from a colder place than this. Not that he ever told Matt this outright; Matt had just pieced it together from a few things, like Mello’s snotty attitude and self-righteous self-reliance, his passive-aggressive refusal to complain about anything, ever.

Mello was standing over him. “Could you turn that shit off?” he said. Matt followed his pointed finger to the television, which he had forgotten was on.

Neither of them ever said “Hey” or “Hi” or anything like that anymore. There was no point in greeting one another when neither of them ever went anywhere, ever really left. Their days grew on them like the beards on their faces. Matt hardly recognized Mello underneath his. Some days he hardly recognized himself.

Matt sniffled. “I’m watching it.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah.” He coughed with phlegm and a vengeance into his sleeve.

“Are you sick?”

“Dunno.” Matt picked the remote out from behind his back, where it had been wedged for the last few hours, and hit the power. “Sorry.”

Mello took it out of his hand, and turned it back on.

His shoulders were set tight as he trudged past Matt, heading out back to split up some firewood.

Matt did not get off the couch, and he did not offer to help. Good on Mello for remaining all sunshine and daisies, but Matt was suffering. His mood was suffering. His sex drive was suffering. Shambling around the house in doubled-up pairs of long underwear tucked into doubled-up pairs of knit socks, Matt looked, felt, and was completely unfuckable.

That, at least, should’ve been a problem for Mello. ‘Cause who the fuck else was he gonna fuck out here? And Mello needed fucking, the horny motherfucker. Chastity might’ve been the only thing he ever failed at.

On screen, Vanna White walked on stage in high heels. The jazzy Wheel of Fortune theme was giving Matt a headache. He lowered the volume. From outside came the ch-chunk, ch-chunk sound of the axe biting wood.

Mello had actually tried it, for about three months when he was fourteen and Matt was fifteen. Watching Mello deny himself just for kicks was the worst fucking ordeal of Matt’s teenage life. In the weeks after he’d turned fifteen, Matt had been starting most of his mornings rock-hard from wet dreams of Mello throwing a pale thigh over him and riding his dick. At that point they hadn’t yet done so much as dry-humped, or made out, or anything. Matt was burning up. Odd exposed parts of Mello aroused him, became masturbation-worthy material: his sparse eyelashes or cracked elbows, the grubby sole of his foot. Shifting around in the upper bunk, listening to Mello shifting around in the lower, Matt had fevered fantasies of Mello breaking his dry spell with Matt; taking Matt by the neck and cramming him facedown into his own pillow.

“I’d like to solve?—Yes?—‘It Was The Best Of Times.’—Very nice, very—”

In the end Mello had chosen to disappoint his God with some jocky older high-school guy. As for Matt, he’d had to settle for having his first encounter with a man years later, in an uncomfortably well-lit alley that smelled of laundry detergent and Chinese food. It was the sloppiest blowjob Matt ever gave. In the moment, he distinctly remembered thinking that he was glad it wasn’t Mello’s cock in his mouth. Matt was convinced that a guy like him would only have one shot at a guy like Mello. He needed it to count; he needed to blow his fucking mind.

After Matt had reunited with Mello, he was beyond relieved that Mello wanted to sleep with him. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d have done if Mello refused him—beat off until his dick chafed off? Fuck off and be by himself again? And then what, kill himself?

The thing was, nobody actually wanted to hear, “I’d die for you.” It was romantic in theory, but very, very unsexy in practice.

Even on the best of days, Matt wasn’t sure what Mello _ would _ like to hear from him. Recently it seemed like all he wanted Matt to open his mouth for was to announce things like, “The house is clear,” “Rod wants to talk to you,” or “Abernathy showed up in Philadelphia.” Rod was their (Mello’s) boss. Jack Abernathy was the man they’d been hunting for the past three months, because Rod wanted him dead and Mello liked a challenge. The Philadelphia tip (a month’s worth of work for Matt) had turned out to be a bust, just another dead end. The feds had squirreled Abernathy away deep in witness protection in exchange for screwing the mob. He was proving nigh-impossible to find—not that that was stopping Mello.

The floor shook. Mello had come in from the snow and was stamping his feet just inside the door. He was wearing one of those fur-lined ear-flapped hats and about ten pounds of flannel. He looked like a fucking hick. His lips were aggressively chapped from the cold, and yet—and always fucking yet—Matt wanted desperately to kiss them.

He tried to convey it with his eyes. Making eye contact with Mello was difficult for him these days. Mello always seemed to be in a scary mood.

Mello’s gaze rang and glanced off his like steel off steel.

“I’m going into town,” he said. “You want anything?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

The usual pause passed, during which Matt wished Mello would ask him to come with, and Mello thought unknowable thoughts. On the TV, someone won a trip to Spain.

“Okay,” was all Mello said. He stumped out of Matt’s vision. Matt heard the screen door bang shut, and then the sound of one of their two junky pickup trucks’ engine turning over.

Matt was in a poetic, melancholy mood. These sounds, he decided, were like the firing of the starting pistol in their race to fail to communicate. Then the sound of the truck faded away down the road into white noise, which was the sound of Mello winning.

Matt was alone again. He closed his eyes.

()

He startled awake to a bang. The TV was still on. News tickers and police sirens swam slowly across the screen. Either someone was coming to kill him, or Mello had just dropped a shit-ton of stuff.

Matt changed the channel and shuffled to his feet. Palming a pistol half-heartedly from under the couch cushions, he went into the kitchen, where he was greeted by a can of tomato sauce rolling heavily into his foot.

Matt put the pistol on the kitchen counter and bent over and picked up one can, and then another. He was avoiding looking at Mello, but was keenly aware of him as he stormed around Matt and into the bathroom, where he threw the door shut hard enough to rattle.

Matt finished picking up the things—pasta, potatoes, a 24-piece pack of frozen chicken thighs. He arranged them into a haphazard group on the counter. It was a lot of stuff. Mello had probably tried to carry the whole thing with his right arm. He was always pushing himself, as if he could beat his way into healing like kicking down a door. Matt wondered if he should try to make dinner, or if that would just make Mello even more defensive.

He gave him fifteen minutes in the bathroom before going over and knocking. 

“Hey.”

No response.

“Dude. I need to take a dump.”

The door unlocked. Mello pushed past him. Matt went in, closing the door behind him. He took the bottle of Tylenol out of the medicine cabinet and emptied it into his hand, counting pills, doing math in his head. Mello had taken three. Pain wasn’t too bad, then.

Shaking the pills back into the bottle, he waited an appropriate amount of time, flushed the toilet, and came out. Mello was in the kitchen, back to him, taking the tops off cans (left-handed) with violent movements of his shoulder.

So much for making dinner. So much for mercy. Matt didn’t know why he bothered. Mello never fucking wanted it, anyway.

()

Mello chilled out a little after dinner. Sliding headfirst into a codeine high, he tolerated increasing amounts of Matt’s clinginess: first Matt scooting over from his side of the couch, then Matt’s hand tugging down the collar of his shirt, then Matt’s breath on his shoulder, and then his mouth moving tentatively over the skin of his throat. But he didn’t really try to touch Matt much, which made Matt sad. Matt eventually pulled off and left Mello on the couch with his wet neck, zombied-out in front of a Golden Girls marathon, and went into the kitchen to do dishes.

Turning the water as hot as he could tolerate, he watched his skin scald.

Mello had licked one of his injuries, once. They were both kids still. During one of their regular escapes from the house, Matt had sliced up the skin of his palm scrambling over the fence ringing the yard.

He cradled his aching hand to his chest. The wound was bright with blood. When Mello saw that he'd fallen behind, he turned and marched up to him. He wrenched the hand away with the air of authority that always sent Matt limp. Matt watched helplessly as Mello spit into his hand and rubbed it in roughly, and when Matt winced, lowered his head and licked the coppery cut. A shiver split him like an arrow, so violent that he was sure Mello felt the spasm from where he was holding his wrist.

Even now Matt remembered it vividly: the contrast of the pain against Mello’s warm, impossibly soft tongue; the little streak of red left on it as it retracted back into Mello’s mouth.

“It’ll keep it clean,” Mello said, to the silent question in Matt’s eye, which answered nothing at all. At that age, Mello wouldn’t cop to liking boys yet, and Matt didn’t know what he liked at all. They were little idiots.

Years later, Matt had brought this up while Mello was licking something else, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he remembered. Propped up on his elbows, thighs hot around Mello’s head, he panted, “Remember when we were kids, and you like, licked my hand this one time?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wait, really?”

“Sure, Matt. I wasn’t exactly going around licking a lot of people back then. Why, did that awaken something in you?”

“Yeah, it awakened me thinking you were, like, a fucking psycho…” He lost his train of thought as Mello took him nearly all the way down. “... wannabe vampire, or something.”

Mello pulled back up, laughing. “But you were into it, Jeevas.” He ran his tongue around the head of Matt’s dick, grazing his teeth lightly over it. “Want me to do it again?”

Matt paled. “Do _ not _ cut me in the dick.”

“Here, then.” Before Matt could react, Mello bit him in the thigh, hard enough to sting, and then soothed his tongue over the skin as blood rushed to the surface, one hand teasing Matt’s balls.

“Oh—shit, yeah—”

“Hm?”

“Fuck, please do that again, like...”

“You want me to blow you, or bite you? Don’t want to get confused.”

_ “Dude. _Too much.”

Mello managed to multitask. Matt’s legs were bruised to hell the next morning. It hurt to shove them into his jeans.

“Fuck,” said Matt, after the ordeal of getting dressed was complete. “Why’d I think it was a good idea to let you do that?”

“I dunno,” said Mello. He was still in his underwear, sitting at the kitchen table and watching Matt mince around. Pleased as the cat that got the cream. “Sometimes you get stupid around me.”

It was true then. Still true now.

Matt winced, pulling his hands out of the water. He’d been zoning out, and now they were smarting with pain and looked a scary beet-red. Running cold water over them hurt more. He gave up on the rest of the dishes. His hands were somehow already freezing by the time he went back out. Mello was snoring, arms crossed over his chest.

Matt double-checked he was asleep. When he was sure, he said to him, “I hate this.” 

Mello didn’t stir.

“I wanna leave,” added Matt. _ I want us to go back to normal. _He wasn’t able to say it. Not even with Mello asleep.

The roar of canned laughter was the sound of Matt pulling ahead in their stupid fucking dead-end race.

Matt tucked several blankets over Mello, and turned the television off.

()

They weren’t in North Dakota because of Abernathy. They were only stuck here because, after Mello had gotten shot, the Higher Ups thought they needed to lay low for a while.

Matt hadn’t needed to be told twice. He’d driven out of town like a bat out of fucking hell, Mello laying in the back and leaking all over Matt’s custom leather seats, while Matt’s chest fizzed with adrenaline like a shook-up Coke can.

Mello was shot twice. Once in the hip, once in his right arm, an inch or two below the elbow. His hip only got nicked and healed up okay, but his arm was still pretty fucked up. Nowadays he drove left-handed, constantly squeezing and releasing a rubber stress ball in his right to help build strength in the torn-up arm muscle. In one month, he had taught himself to do everything left-handed: drive, write, smoke, cook, shoot. Mello’s teflon adaptability was like a superpower. He would’ve really shone in prehistoric times. Matt could imagine him hunched over a fire, fashioning an innovative spear out of flint and hair and grit.

He was getting a little better, Matt decided—not that Mello bothered to keep him informed. He’d seen him keep his hand shut in a fist for about fifteen seconds or so.

The thought suddenly occurred to Matt: did he jack off with his left hand now?

The idle curiosity boiled off soon enough, left Matt’s chest a simmering pot of rage. So what, Matt wasn’t even good as Mello’s non-dominant hand? Matt’s fucking mouth wasn’t good enough for him, the cocky little fuck?

Half-awake, Matt reached angrily for himself under the sweaty cave of blankets. It should’ve been Mello’s mouth there. Mello owed him at least that, for getting him out of L.A., for tying the first tourniquet of Matt’s life over his slippery, blown-up arm, for having to endure the thirty-hour nightmare where he really, honest to God thought that Mello might die.

Matt’s hands smelled like blood for a week, from where Mello had gotten under his fingernails and couldn’t be scrubbed out. Christ’s sake.

Matt could be adult about this, okay. He was chill with admitting that that whole situation had scared the shit out of him—if only Mello were willing to have a fucking conversation, instead of retreating behind his personal iron curtain of Competence and Cool and O-fucking-kay. But what the hell did Mello expect from him? To pretend forever that Matt had not indeed helped save his life? Like_ that _ was what wasn’t cool in Mello’s books, _ that _was one step too far over the line. Fuck’s sake, Matt would’ve given Mello any of his organs without hesitation. If Mello didn’t know that, he was a dumbass. If that freaked Mello out, maybe he needed to grow the hell up.

You know what Matt even did? When the thirty hours were up and the doctor came out and told him Mello was stable and that he could go in? Matt fucking waited. He sat on the hands that had trembled for Mello, and he waited, because he wanted to give Mello time to put himself together. So that Mello would feel _ comfortable_. So that he wouldn’t have to live with the shame of showing himself naked and vulnerable to Matt—a sight that Matt had of course already seen, when Mello had been busy threatening to die on his backseat.

And now fucking Mello was fucking icing him.

Asshole.

Matt came with whatever the opposite of relief was.

Sleep was hard to find that night.


	2. Emilia-Romagna

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Italy had been the happiest time of Matt’s life.

In the scraps of sleep between waking, Matt dreamt of Italy, as he often did.

Italy had been the happiest time of Matt’s life. He and Mello spent five months there, doing a little work but mostly driving around, gaining weight (5 kilos each), and getting tanned (Matt) or sunburnt (Mello). Matt had never been out of country before, and although Mello forbade them from going to the usual touristy spots, he made up for it by showing Matt obscure castle ruins, and tiny vineyards, and empty beaches where they could skinny-dip with abandon. 

They spent long hours on the road, riding motorbikes—one, single bike which they took turns driving while whoever was the passenger was forced to cling to the driver’s waist, maybe tuck his chin into their shoulder. Maybe palm them through the front of their pants while they were helpless to defend themselves. Utter bliss.

Mello turned halfway around. “Cut that shit out.”

“Eyes on the road, man. What, you mean this?”

“My crotch is not your fucking armrest.”

Matt pulled his hand away. Licked Mello’s ear, kitten-like.

“Matt,” said Mello evenly. “You see this road?”

“Uh, barely. Your bitchin’ hair keeps like, getting in my eyes.”

“You see how this road winds? You see that drop off to the side? Consider keeping your hands to yourself, or I  _ will  _ drive us off a cliff, and we  _ will  _ die.”

“You do literally the exact same shit when I’m driving—actually you’re like, twice as bad. And no one ever hears me complaining.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you’re not a safe driver.”

“Or maybe I’m just a better driver. Like, fucking stuntman skills up in this shit.” Mello ignored him; a stupid move, considering Matt had him sandwiched between his thighs. He ran his hands up Mello’s shirt. “I totally am. I’m a better driver than you.”

When Matt touched his dick, Mello swerved the bike violently, steered them jolting off the road in a spray of pebbles and dirt. He vaulted off the bike practically while it was still running, throwing his helmet off before wrenching Matt’s off so insistently that it gave Matt a crick in the neck. While Matt was still complaining about that, Mello seized him by the wrist and dragged him into the field bordering the road, where he threw him onto the ground about a dozen feet in.

Matt didn’t really give a shit about his clothes, but he still found it in himself to be angry when Mello tore the thinning shoulder seam of his t-shirt wide open while yanking it over his head.

“Hey—dude! What the fuck!” he yelped, watching Mello toss Matt’s clothes aside like so much garbage.

“Shut up,” Mello seethed. “I told you to stop that shit. You want us to get killed? And for what, a fuck?” He was crowding over Matt, blocking out the sky. His nails were in Matt’s jawline and his weight completely on Matt, pressing him into the dirt in a full-body chokehold. “Sometimes you’re so goddamn slutty.” He knocked Matt’s knees open, and slapped him in the thigh when he tried to close again on instinct. “You want to get fucked so badly? I can do that.”

Matt was helplessly turned on. Mello talked a rough game but worked him open gently enough, spitting on his fingers, pausing whenever Matt winced or hissed. He touched and licked him through it until Matt was relaxed enough to take him. And then he waited, the bastard. He actually made Matt beg. And Matt did it, because Mello keyed him up beyond sanity or shame.

Mello took him on his hands and knees. Not having to look at Mello freed Matt up to babble whatever nonsense he usually kept suppressed—mostly ego-stroking shit, like telling Mello how good he was, pleading with him not to stop. Mello, usually an absolute bitch at accepting a compliment, must’ve been pretty lost in the moment too, because he ate it up whole-heartedly. Matt came with Mello pressed deep into him, one of Mello’s hands around his dick and the other gripping sweatily into his hip. Mello kept a tight hold of him as he came, which nearly made Matt scream; oversensitive, it was too much. He batted Mello’s hand away. Mello fucked into him a couple more times before pulling out, manhandling Matt over onto his back and pulling himself off onto Matt’s stomach.

“Gross,” said Matt faintly, and Mello answered vaguely, “Uh-huh.” Matt would’ve taken more pride in how successfully he’d drained the cockiness out of Mello, if he hadn’t been teetering on the verge of a blackout himself.

They dozed in the dirt for a couple of minutes.

A cricket leapt off Matt’s bare stomach. Matt woke up abruptly. He jostled Mello’s shoulder. “Hey. We should go.”

“Mm.”

“We left the bike on the road.”

“Nobody’s going to steal the bike.”

When Matt tried to sit up, Mello grabbed his arm and slung it over Mello’s side, so that Matt was forced to lie back down too.

“Mel,” Matt complained.

“Shh,” he said.

Matt shushed. They slept. The moment was rarer than diamond. The earth was blood-warm, and the air sweet.

Matt woke first, again. Their sun-warmed spot was now cooling in the shade of early evening. Mello was still warm, though. Curled onto his side, he was holding hands with Matt in his sleep: Matt’s right, Mello’s left, fingers woven and cradled against Mello’s clavicle under his chin.

Matt felt a crushing weight roll over him. Mello didn’t ever hold hands.

The whole summer lay cradled in Matt’s palm like a baby bird. Fragile as the ridge of Mello’s rib beneath his arm. He knew it wouldn’t last.

Mello let go of Matt’s hand seconds before he opened his eyes, so that Matt was never sure if Mello even knew it had happened.

As they were getting up to go, Matt picked up his sad, torn shirt from the dirt. Mello looked at it and then at him. He took his own shirt off and tugged it over Matt’s head, a weirdly mother-hennish gesture that stirred up distant memories of Matt’s mom shoving a jacket onto him on some cold winter’s day. Matt blinked, disoriented, in a cloud of Mello-smell. He hadn’t thought about his family in a long time.

Watching him, Mello said, “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Matt said.

Trying to shake himself from his stupor, he focused on watching Mello put his leather jacket on over his hard, bare chest. Took him in in the gloaming: the goth-ass rosary around his neck, the tight-ass pants hugging his legs, the flash of his Zippo as he lit one of Matt’s cigarettes.

Matt was in fucking love. He said to him, “You don’t have to, like, front so hard. It’s just me.”

Mello sighed. “Get on,” he said to Matt. “We’ve lost t—”

()

Matt woke briefly. Somewhere in the house, Mello had had a nightmare. Mello himself didn’t make that much noise, but the sound his gun made when he cocked it always woke Matt up. He waited to see if Mello would walk around the house as he did sometimes, checking for God knew what.

Matt thought Mello was paranoid. Mello thought Matt was apathetic.

No further sound. Matt drifted back into sleep, but it was thin and patchy. He did not dream again.

()

Matt couldn’t know this, but Italy had also been the happiest time of Mello’s life. Poor Mello, who had never in all his life felt secure or at ease. Born with the greatest chip on his shoulder mankind had ever seen, the insecure boy who craved power, whose sexuality was a great guilt, whose God was pitiless, who whipped himself mercilessly, whose mind was intricate circuitry firing constantly on the brink of flame, of burning Mello himself out in the service of knowledge and power and knowledge and power—that boy, in that summer, was the closest to peace that he’d ever get.

Sleeping in the cradle of the bedrock country of his Faith, he found himself certain of God, certain of Matt, of his future and of theirs. Twenty-one years of turbulence and torment vanished in the porthole of the bike’s rear view, which showed nothing but the road sailing away endlessly behind him and one edge of Matt’s laughing face.

It would, Mello thought, in a moment of wild and ill-calculated optimism, be smooth sailing from here.

()

One year later, to the day, bullets would tear through the finely formed, God-given flesh. For the umpteenth time, Mello would have to learn to remake himself again.

And, like every time Mello had had to build himself from scratch, he swore to himself that with the wisdom of his thirteen-sixteen-nineteen-twenty-two years, this time he would make it right. He would leave out what needed to be left out, keep what needed to be kept. God give him a clear heart, clear mind. This time he would be perfect.

Casting about in his pocket for anything left he could sacrifice to the pyre of selfhood, his hand landed naturally on Matt.

Poor Matt, clueless Matt, whose fist had slackened around its anger in his sleep. He cried a little, and woke up puffy-eyed.


	3. North Dakota II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Unbelievable. Mello was really fucking someone else. Population fucking 1,348, and Mello had found someone to screw.

Matt’s eyes were a little swollen when he woke up. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. He was probably allergic to something in the house. Maybe he was allergic to the whole fucking state.

Two months had passed, like kidney stones.

Matt took a Benadryl and three gummy multivitamins. He was addicted to eating those—the vitamins, not the Benadryl. Probably the healthiest habit he’d ever picked up.

Opening his laptop, he turned over onto his stomach and spent a couple hours trawling through the streets of L.A. on Google Street View. He wanted Mello to come in and see this and have a fight with him about it. Matt was only kind of homesick for Los Angeles, but he was really homesick for Mello.

Mello didn’t materialize. His laptop battery died. Matt got up and went into the living room. Mello was doing push-ups. Regular, then one-handed. In a normal, healthy condition, he could do push-ups on his fingertips, which was fucking annoying.

“Vitamin?” offered Matt.

“Hm?”

“You want a vitamin?”

“What?”

Matt yanked Mello’s headphones out of his ears. “What’re you listening to?”

“Goddamnit.”

“Is this fucking classical? Who listens to classical music when they work out? Hannibal Lecter?”

Mello took his weight off his arms just long enough to glower at him and shove the headphones back in.

Matt went over and sat on Mello’s back, squashing him into the ground and sending both of them tumbling. Sometimes pissing Mello off made him want to fuck Matt. Matt was running out of things to try.

Thrashing, Mello kicked him nearly in the groin, which put a stop to any sort of mood he might’ve been in.

“Ow!”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Dude, calm down.”

“What the  _ fuck." _

“Whatever. You’ve done like a hundred pushups already anyway. You want a vitamin, man?”

“Is that why your breath smells like that? How many of those things’ve you eaten?”

“They’re  _ healthy.” _

“Go brush your teeth, christ. Your tongue looks diseased.”

“What’s the point? Not like I’ve got plans today, or, uh, like any day, ever.”

Mello ignored this jab. He had moved on to doing crunches.

In the mirror, Matt’s tongue was splotched like a cow’s hide with blue and orange and toxic lime green.

He wandered the house, touring the toothbrush leisurely around his foul mouth, opening and shutting cabinets. Their fridge was mostly empty. “How’re we on cash?” he asked through a mouthful of toothpaste foam.

“Fine.”

“I wonder if I should get a job,” said Matt. This meant,  _ when the hell are we getting out of here? _

“You don’t need to get a fucking job,” said Mello, which meant  _ fuck off, Matt, we move when I say so. _

“Okay, sorry, jesus. You want me to hold your feet?” said Matt. He meant,  _ I miss you. _

Mello grunted. “‘M’okay” he said. Which meant…?

()

Later, Mello went into town on his twice-monthly grocery run. Matt lay on the floor in the spot where Mello had been exercising, chain-smoking in a poor attempt to self-soothe. Jokes aside, the classical music thing had rattled him, helped along by several months of Mello’s radio silence. Realizing he didn’t know what type of music Mello liked quickly spiralled into questioning whether he knew anything about Mello at all, which was basically the same thing as having an existential crisis.

Trying to calm himself down, he made a list of the worst possible things, to show him the situation was not as dire as it could be:

  1. Mello being dead.
  2. Mello leaving him.
  3. Mello hating him.

Well, fuck.

()

Something verging on panic pushed Matt out of the house for the first time in eleven days, bundling him into the truck that Mello always left for him, because it stank incurably of Matt’s cigarettes, and because it had a manual transmission, which Mello had difficulty operating with his bad hand. Matt had left the window open. Inside, the seats were frozen solid.

Numb to the bone, Matt sat on a couple of folded-up towels and ran the heat up to 10. Once he was on the road and forced to pull his head out of his ass to do things like work the gearshift and scan the asphalt for slicks of black ice, he was able to see things a little more clearly. He might not know everything about Mello, but Mello tried hard to be unknowable, the prick. Matt still had a better goddamn handle on him than anyone else this side of Heaven—and had God been the one to help press His torn-up shirt into Mello’s gushing arm, grinding his teeth into powder over the awful pain noises Mello was making? Yeah, he didn’t fucking think so.

Remembering it, Matt’s body began to threaten to hurl. He pulled over onto the shoulder, sticking his head into the cold over the road. Nothing came out but a few nose drips. Coughing hurt the back of his throat. Matt slammed the door shut, merged back on.

His fingers felt wet on the wheel. It was probably just the vehicle warming up.

In his copious spare time, Matt had looked up: could you get PTSD from getting shot? Yes. And could you get PTSD from watching someone get shot? Yes, probably.

Maybe Mello was being fucking weird around him because Matt was, like, a trigger. That would be nice—well, not Mello having fucking PTSD, but, like, having some sort of explanation for, like...

Matt groaned, pushing his forehead briefly against the steering wheel. He was a dick. He was being such a dick.

From now on, he vowed—not for the first time, it must be said—he was going to be nothing but supportive and kind and patient with Mello. He would not abandon Mello’s codeine-addicted, busted-arm paranoid-ass self. He was going to be here for him.

Matt was careful to slow to precisely 30 MPH when he came to the border of their one-horse town. In his newly-minted positive mindset, he was able to view Mello’s million barked diatribes vis-a-vis the fine points of lying low, avoiding any possible encounter with the law, not drawing attention, etcetera with something bordering affection. Mello was not being an overbearing asshole. He was just looking out for them.

See, the Matt of yesterday, confronted with the world’s longest red light at the world’s emptiest intersection, probably would’ve just gunned it through.

The Matt of today, reformed man, was happy to concede to Mello’s wisdom. He waited.

Tapping his fingers on the wheel, he suddenly caught sight of Mello’s truck. It blended in perfectly among a scrum of equally miserable-looking vehicles in a parking lot a bit down the main drag.

Smiling tiredly at the glaring red light as he waited, Matt thought he’d go in and say hi to him, give him a little bit of a surprise. Why not? Wasn’t Mello always bitching at him to get out of the house?

()

Matt stood in Branson’s Marketplace & Liquor (est. 1983) in a state of shock. He was there, eating a bag of Doritos, because he didn’t know what the fuck else to do.

Ten minutes earlier, in the middle of pulling into the parking lot, he had watched Mello amble out of a bar with some guy, and climb amiably into that guy’s passenger seat, leaving his pickup and Matt’s pickup and Matt all by themselves.

There was no reason for Mello to be talking to anybody, or getting into anybody’s car. There was zero chance that anybody in this town knew a thing about Abernathy. Which only really left one option.

Unbelievable. Mello was really fucking someone else. Population fucking 1,348, and Mello had found someone to screw.

A wave of tired came over Matt and nearly bowled him over. He had to sit. Now. He could only find one chair in the entire store, in the back, next to a table with a blood pressure cuff. He sagged into it and got his measured. 110 over 70; not bad.

Would’ve thought it might be a little higher.

Matt wanted to feel angry, but mostly just felt exhausted. His mouth was thick with Dorito dust and his eyelids were heavy. He put his head down onto the table.

()

“Sir?”

Matt woke up like climbing out of a swamp, or a hangover. He wiped drool from his mouth as someone touched his shoulder gently.

“Uh?”

“Sir, excuse me. I’m so sorry, but you can’t sleep in here.”

“Sorry, uh. I didn’t mean to. Sleep, I mean.”

“Tired, huh?” the store worker said sympathetically, as if this was a legitimate excuse, like Matt was some kind of narcoleptic.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Those’re good numbers.”

“What?”

She pointed at his blood pressure readout.

“Oh. Yeah, I guess they are.”

“Terribly sorry, sir.”

“S’okay. Sorry for falling asleep.”

“You have a wonderful day now.”

Matt waved hesitantly at her, forgetting to bring the rest of his chips with him.

()

He drove back in pitch darkness. Sun set early this far north, and he had slept for quite a while. Mello’s truck had vanished from the lot when he drove past it on his way out of town.

The dry air of the supermarket had blistered his nostrils. Picking at it with one hand, he gave himself a nosebleed.

Nose trickling, heart aching, Matt drove up to their house, which blazed with light. This was unusual enough to cause him to draw the pistol out of his waistband as he unlocked the door.

He swung the sight at nothing but Mello. He was standing in the middle of the kitchen, rubber gloves on, wiping the knobs of cabinets with a red-and-white checked towel. He had shaved. The months of beard growth had blurred the purposeful edges of his face; with the scruff gone Matt was confronted by its familiar hard planes, the cutting cheekbones, hockey-stick jawline. He looked like himself again.

“Yo. What’s up?” said Matt.

“Hi,” said Mello. “Get your stuff. We’re going.”


	4. Odessa I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being Mello’s tool had become comfortable.

Odessa was a weird place. Everyone drove white pickups, and at night, the world blazed for miles in all directions with the blue lights of the oil rigs, so that you felt like you were underwater.

Momentarily, things looked up. They were back in the swing of things: Matt with his wires and computers, Mello with his backroom conversations and greasing of hands, the pistol down his pants. They had received a tip from home base: the name of a drilling operation Abernathy had supposedly been working at. Mello got himself hired there, while Matt sat in their apartment hooked up to sweet fiber WiFi, snooping around for other signs of life. Mello would come home after work, shed his generic southern persona at the door, and compare notes with Matt over whatever takeout Matt had ordered for them. It was the mob version of a domestic life.

Within a week they knew that Abernathy had been using the name Will Lyons, that he had abruptly quit the drilling job a month ago on account of his mother’s health worsening, and moved somewhere far away, possibly north; nobody could recall him saying exactly where. People agreed the guy kept to himself. Matt put out fingers for Will Lyons everywhere online, but he hadn’t found much of use yet. No credit cards, no plates. Once again, the trail grew cold under their hands.

The door clicked. Matt glanced up as Mello came into the apartment. Mello had chewed him out a couple days ago for not checking to see who was coming in, so he was making an effort to look at the door whenever it opened. Whatever, he thought. He was able to tell from the rhythm Mello’s boots made on the floor that it was him, anyway.

“Hey,” he said.

Mello stepped straight over Matt where he was laying on the floor, and went across the room to the window. He slid one dusty blind slat down. “See that Subaru?”

“Uh-huh?”

“It’s been sitting out there for a while.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I’ve seen it around a lot.”

“Maybe they live here.”

“If they live here, why’re they always idling on their ass out on the curb?”

“I used to do that.”

“When?”

“You gotta keep it running so you have A.C. Otherwise it gets hot as balls in about three minutes.”

“Matt. When the hell would you be sitting in your car outside your own house?”

Matt shrugged. “I used to get into fights with my girlfriend,” he said.

“Didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, so? Haven’t you had boyfriends?”

Mello sneered. “I don’t date.”

“That’s cool,” said Matt. He was thinking about Mello climbing into a stranger’s car back in North Dakota. He couldn’t fathom how he did that shit: drop in, hook up, walk out. Flush people out of his life like condoms down toilets. It must take a special kind of damage.

“I don’t like this.” It took Matt a second to realize Mello had switched back to talking about the Subaru, which seemed totally innocuous to him. “Let’s move.”

“Fucking seriously?”

“One hour.”

“I _ just _ fucking unpacked.” Matt gestured furiously at his equipment, spread all around the room. “You know, not all of us can just roll around with a gun and like, two pairs of jeans or whatever.”

“I’ll help you.”

“It’s fine, I’ll—dude, don’t close that, dude, please. Holy shit. It’s still running something. Just leave it.”

“Did you break up with her?”

“Huh?”

“Your girlfriend.”

“Yeah, Mel. Obviously.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“I, uh. Okay, before you judge me, I just really needed her off my back—I told her I was gay.”

Unexpectedly, Mello laughed. “Christ, that’s mean.”

“I know, I know. But I had to make sure she’d really give up on me.”

“Were you sad?”

“To break up with her?”

Mello tapped one of his laptops. “Can I unplug this?”

“Yeah, that one’s okay. Give the cable here. Uh, yeah, I guess. I mean, I liked her, but like. You gotta do what you gotta do. You know.”

Mello shrugged. “You didn’t have to come to L.A.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You didn’t,” he insisted.

Matt wished he’d stop saying that. “I guess not,” he said, finally.

They wiped down the apartment together in silence, the humming and whirring of computer fans finally wound down and stopped.

Mello left first, Matt a half-hour after him. He spent the spare time sitting on the toilet, being careful not to touch anything, his hair in a shower cap so that he wouldn’t accidentally shed any evidence. He checked himself into a motel while he waited for Mello to contact him with the address of whatever apartment they’d move to next. He should’ve spent the time working on Abernathy, but he didn’t really feel like setting up all of his stuff, so he mainly just watched reruns of 24 on television, blowing smoke out of the window as Jack Bauer sprinted around on screen, hunting guys like him and Mello down.

From here, he could see the motel’s pool. Kids splashed in the water, chased each other around the “No Running” signs. Occasionally one would trip and run crying to a parent.

When Matt was younger, he sometimes fantasized about being a normal kid, with a normal life. Lately, he’d begun to realize that if he were normal, he’d probably not be attracted to Mello, nor Mello to him. It was their damages that fit well together.

Matt could make peace with that. Nothing he could do about it, anyway.

His burner rang. He picked up, said, “Miss me?”

()

Their latest apartment was unfurnished, again. Again, Matt was forced to waste a day purchasing shitty used furniture. Mello could sleep on the floor like a psychopath if that was what made him happy; Matt needed at least a bed and a couch. Clicking around on Craigslist, he got them a used waterbed for $50. Fun and sexy.

Matt had decided he would put his foot down if Mello made them move again. He was getting more paranoid, if that was even possible.

The waterbed might’ve been a mistake, because it had zero motion isolation, and every time Mello got off it in the throes of a nightmare, it woke Matt up.

He flashed awake as a floorboard creaked by his head.

Mello was kneeling in their kitchen. Half his body was beneath the card table Matt had picked up from a Salvation Army. He had taken some of its screws out. Checking for bugs. Christ. Matt walked around him, got some bologna and peanut butter out of the fridge, and made himself a sandwich.

“You want one?” he said. When Mello didn’t respond, he added, “I’ve been in this apartment nearly all goddamn week. No one’s come in here.”

Mello shoved himself upright. He said hostiley, “Why’d you buy a waterbed?”

“It was cheap.”

“It’s stupid. You always wake up.”

“Yup. I do.” Matt forced himself to swallow his bite of sandwich. Bread clung to the roof of his mouth. “Maybe you should try taking Ambien or something.”

“I can’t just take fucking Ambien.” Mello went to stand by the sink, back shoved against the counter and arms crossed. Hackles way up. “It doesn’t—I can’t mix them.”

Oh. So he was still on the Tylenol then. Matt had stopped monitoring his meds some time back, when Mello quit spending evenings visibly looped out. He thought he’d been getting better.

He went over to Mello, and pulled at his arm. “Lemme see.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Fuck _ off.” _

Matt lowered his head to press his mouth to Mello’s scar, and was rewarded with his arms coming a couple inches loose from their knot. He moved as gently as he knew how. The skin was the color of a wine stain, and felt crazy gnarly beneath his lips. It had an inhuman texture, like tree bark.

“What does it feel like?”

He could feel Mello shudder. “Like burning,” he said.

()

While his laptop was chewing through Ector County’s water billing database, Matt got bored. He dug out his ziploc bag of fake IDs; passports from countries he’d never been to. Mello’s stack was even thicker, neatly rubber-banded together. He thumbed through the pages, looking for which two had the stamps from Italian border control.

Apparently, he’d gone in as Damian Holt. Mello’s was for “Nico Moser” and was Germany-issued—why Germany, Matt didn’t know. Maybe he spoke the language.

Sometimes Matt liked to make up lives for these imaginary people. He’d tell himself the story of how American Damian and German Nico came to meet one fine summer in Italy. Maybe they were college students on a semester abroad. Maybe Damian had a cat, Nico an angry ex. Nobody ever got shot in these stories. They were all about middle-class upbringings, stifling family holidays, morning commutes and the lover’s kiss that made it all tolerable.

He pressed his cheek against the bars of these ordinary alternate lives, which would never admit him.

()

A few days later, Mello finally hit the jackpot: several well-lit photos of their man from a company barbeque. Front-facing and both profiles. Perfect.

Neither of them had actually seen Abernathy up till that point. They looked down at the man on Mello’s laptop screen together.

“He’s generic looking,” said Mello.

Matt shrugged. “Nobody’s generic to an algorithm.” Zooming in to 300 percent, he marked up the face in the background with dozens of neon green dots: tip of nose, bottom of chin, both pupils. “Where’d you find these?”

“This guy’s wife. She scrapbooks.”

“So what, you just like cut them out and ran?”

Mello unzipped his backpack and hefted the whole damn book out, pastel and thick as a layer cake. “I told her my wife likes doing that shit, yadda yadda. She loaned me three more of these fucking things. Scanned the pictures in at Kinko’s.”

“I guess that’d be me.”

“What kind of a hobby is scrapbooking?

“The wife, I mean. Although I think I’m more of a cool live-in girlfriend.”

“You’re more of a pain in the ass, most of the time. I mean, look at this shit. All this cutting shit out, gluing shit together. And for what, so you can flip through it once every ten years and be proud of, of what? Spending all that fucking time looking back?”

“Some people like looking back. Lots of people do. Normal people. So you tell everyone you’re married?”

“No, I tell them I’m a big flaming faggot. Christ. I’m trying to blend in, not get lynched.”

“Wait, that’s totally a wedding ring.”

“Did you just notice? I’ve been wearing this for a month.”

“Is it real?”

“It’s a real ring made out of gold. I didn’t cut it off the finger of some newlywed, if that’s what you’re asking. Found it at a Goodwill.”

Matt held his hand out and Mello gave it over. He ran his finger over the scratched-up metal. It didn’t look like a newlywed’s ring. Had more of the dull, solid appearance of a long marriage, he thought—not that he would know anything about that.

Like all the kids who’d grown up in that house, somewhere along the line, Matt had internalized the idea that he’d have a short life. They were never told this. They just figured it out. Some of them, the burning ones like Near and Mello, learned to glorify it; to chase the life that burnt at both ends in the service of some higher power, some greater good. The rest of them were left to cope.

Lots of kids killed themselves, after they turned eighteen and left. Happened all the time.

Matt hadn’t killed himself, but he didn’t think anything of his would end up in a Goodwill, either. He didn’t own much anyway.

He handed the ring back to Mello. “Fucking lame.”

“I know.”

Watching him put it back on was a wistful fucking sight.

He added, “So not your style.”

“Not my fucking style,” Mello agreed.

()

Now Matt spent hours everyday hand-feeding Abernathy’s face to the dogs: various image processors, janky ML algorithms running on distributed instances, spindly-legged web crawlers. The hounds were hungry and Matt kept very busy slopping various illicit data dumps into their troughs. It was tiring shit. Matt was tired, 24/7.

He was becoming wild and ill-socialized. Existing in his blue-light cave, he never got dressed, never opened a window, had no sleep schedule, no manners. His vocabulary shrunk down to the exact set of words he needed to interact with Mello, which wasn’t much—they’d known each other so long, been around each other so constantly that they were developing a kind of spooky, nonverbal twin communication. If Matt saw Mello scratch anywhere, he’d develop an itch in the same spot.

Sensing Matt’s increasingly feral state, Mello began rousting him out of the apartment one or two times a week to run meaningless errands. He struck gold on the strategy of refusing to ever bring Matt cigarettes, so that Matt would be forced at gunpoint by his addiction to go out and purchase some.

He also regularly nitpicked his appearance, pointing at his overgrown nails and saying, “Don’t those bother you?”

“Not really.”

“I think they’re gross.”

Matt flipped him off before clipping them.

When he came out of the bathroom, Mello was smoking the last cigarette from his carton.

“You’re such an asshole. You don’t even smoke.”

“There’s so much secondhand in here, I figured it’d be faster to just kill myself directly.” Mello made shooing motions. “Out.”

“Bitch.”

“Don’t buy menthols this time.”

“I said, bitch!”

Outside, the late-spring heat ironed him into the pavement. Walking down the sidewalk was like navigating a minefield—where to look? At the floor? The sky? No, keep it at eye level. But people’s faces? How long to hold eye contact before shit got weird?

The teenage girl working the counter at the 7/11 down the block looked at Matt like he was a meth addict.

“That all?”

“Yeah. I mean, no, can I get the Newports, too. Please.”

“$10.34. You got change?”

“Huh?”

“We’re running kinda low. It’s no big if you don’t,” she added, but it was too late. Conditioned by Mello to intuit orders from every statement, Matt leapt to obey. For a whole minute, he scrounged in the nooks and crannies of his wallet and numerous pockets for pennies, oblivious to the scrum of people waiting impatiently in line behind him, and the roll of the clerk’s mascara’d eyes.

Even these scripted encounters were exhausting. Fuck’s sake, he’d forgotten he even had a girlfriend until the other day, telling Mello about her.

The guy who’d held down a fairly steady relationship, casual friends, a weed dealer and work acquaintances at a series of dead-end jobs, lay facedown in the rearview of the guy who’d dropped all that to take on the full-time career of hunting down Mello.

Being Mello’s tool had become comfortable. Hiding in his pocket, mostly ignored, while he barrelled hell-bent towards his personal ambitions.

What the fuck was Matt supposed to do if he left? Go back to being a person? _ Fuck that, _ Matt thought, as he let himself back in.

The apartment was mostly dark. On the television, some scuzzy porn channel played at low volume. Mello was lying on the couch, facing away from him, his head on one armrest and feet kicked up on the other. He had one knee up against the back of the couch and was playing with himself, idly.

Matt froze in the doorway. The two guys on screen were dark with chest hair and had thick retro-looking mustaches. Between all the hair and the stupid macho grunts, it was like watching a pair of gorillas fuck. He wondered what kind of porn Mello liked. This was not something they did together, watch videos or stuff like that. Did Mello ever look for “redhead”? Matt would rather die than let Mello see his porn search history, which consisted mainly of terms like “blonde” and “skinny” and “dom” and other things that described Mello exactly. In fact, you could take any combination of Mello’s physical characteristics and add the term “big tits” and that would pretty much sum up Matt’s ideal—and you couldn’t exactly blame the tit thing on Mello.

While Matt was still standing there, Mello tilted his head a degree farther back and looked him dead in the eye.

“You done observing?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Come over here.”

Matt went over. “Sit,” Mello said. Matt hesitated. Mello was taking up the whole couch with no signs of moving, and there was no chair, so he sat on the floor.

Mello’s eyes were flickering between him and the screen now. “Take your shirt off.”

_ You didn’t say Simon Says, _Matt thought about saying, but Mello didn’t seem like he was in the mood for banter. He peeled his shirt over his head and slung it into a corner.

Mello had pushed his clothes out of the way just enough so that he was bare from belly button to curve of skinny ass. Matt was getting kind of hard watching him touch himself languidly. He wanted to blow him, to feel Mello lose patience and start pushing into his mouth. And it was a little awkward, kneeling on the floor with nothing to do. He wasn’t sure if Mello wanted to see him touch himself.

“I can blow you?” he asked uncertainly.

“No,” said Mello without hesitation. Matt paused, stung. Part of him wanted to get up and leave, because fuck that tone, but part of him wanted to stay because this was the closest thing he’d had to a sexual encounter with Mello since—could it be possible? December of last year?

He compromised by doing what was possibly the worst thing, which was to start a conversation. “Are things—I mean, are you—is shit okay?”

“What shit?”

“I dunno. I feel like stuff has been weird.”

“Give me an example.”

Fuck Mello; he always gave you openings in such a straightforward manner that it was beyond unhelpful and actually cowed Matt even more. Like flinching at a high-five. Matt dodged the question. “Like, with Abernathy… Like it feels like we’re never gonna find him.”

“We’re going to find him,” Mello said, predictably.

“... Okay, maybe. But it doesn’t _ feel _ like we are.”

“I can’t help how you feel,” Mello shot back nastily.

“Do you really think we’re any closer to getting him than we were last year?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? We have his photo. We’re going to get him. I don’t care how long it takes. If you don’t think we’re making progress fast enough, that’s fine. You can go back to L.A. and wait it out.”

“Are you seriously telling me to fuck off?”

“I’m saying you’re free to do what you need to do. What _ do _ you want to do?”

“Nothing. I mean, anything’s fine. I want to get him too.”

“Then stay with me.”

This was too much. “Mel,” Matt tried again. “I really wanna like… can I come over?”

Mello didn’t say yes, but didn’t say no either. Didn’t stop Matt from crowding over him on the couch, backlit by the obscene push-and-pull on the television. Matt took him in hand.

“Yeah?” he asked.

Mello still didn’t say. His tongue slid between his teeth as Matt pumped his hand, slowly at first, then quicker. He breathed out hard when Matt made a circle with his fingers and tightened around the base of him; kept his hand there as he licked up the shaft.

“Don’t—”

Matt pulled up. “Just hands?”

Mello kept trying to buck into the ring of Matt’s fingers, so Matt climbed more on top of him, sitting on his thighs to keep him still. “s’ cool, man,” he added to soothe. “Whatever you want.”

Matt normally found giving handjobs kind of boring, but Mello was such a goddamn show, laid out on the couch, shifting around beneath him. He pushed his shirt farther up for him, pulling on him one-handed while he ran the other lightly over chest and abs and happy trail. Mello’s body hair was so different than Matt’s, silvery blonde and fine, only really visible when it caught light, like he was glittering in little bits. God fucking damn, his body was so fucking perfect, he thought, as his eyes snagged on Mello’s as they were shutting. Matt kept it to himself. Mello couldn’t abide a compliment face to face. He tugged on the rosary, pressing the edges of the cross into Mello’s chest—

“Quit playing,” Mello said. His voice was a little hoarse, low.

Matt felt himself flush. He really, really wanted to suck him off, but settled for jerking him until he came into Matt’s palm. Mello’s eyes opened again, were hot and blue on his, as he licked one finger.

“Ew.”

“Nobody asked you.”

“It’s not like normally this bad. You gotta eat more vegetables.”

Mello wasn’t listening, half-asleep. Cute.

But when Matt came out from washing his hands, he was not only fully awake but standing, stuffing himself efficiently back into his tight pants.

Matt was stunned. “You, uh, headed out?”

“Gotta talk to a guy.”

“You have to go right now.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” said Matt, disbelieving. He meant, _ what the fuck? _

They both stood there for a second, the sound of the still-running porno razing on in the background.

“Cool,” said Mello finally.

Mello didn’t used to say that word as much. He got that from Matt, Matt thought, as he turned off the television and left.

()

While Matt was in the bathroom at the house, jerking himself off in a rage, Mello was driving down the road in a white pickup at precisely the speed limit. He didn’t want to be law-abiding; he wanted to fly down the road, wanted to be back in L.A., wanted to not be taking orders from Rod, spending half a goddamn year hunting down some asshole who meant nothing except proving Mello was _ that _ motherfucker, the motherfucker who _ could _—continuing, he wanted to call the shots, give the orders, wanted his body whole, wanted to fuck Matt, too. Mello wanted a lot of things. His upbringing and his faith had taught him that he was allowed very few of them.

The boy who’d run roughshod over Italian countryside, his lover warming his back, flushed with the fever of happiness, daring for the first time to dream he could have it all, lay facedown in the rearview of the man who’d learned better.

His arm shot unholy pain through him.

He took it off the wheel. Forced his teeth to unclench.

He’d been thinking about sending Matt away from him. Even brushing against this thought hurt, which made Mello trust it instinctively. He was the type to cauterize his wounds.

He’d slipped up badly back there, driven to the brink by months of being unable to touch himself properly—fuck’s sake, been driven to take crazy fucking risks, like that time in Dakota—but he could come back from this. Would have to, if he was going to be anything rather than nothing, which—well.

If he could survive without Matt, he’d have shed his humanity at last, which meant he might as well be god.

That, Mello reminded himself, was the goal.


	5. Odessa II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt had always thought he’d like for Mello to be as needy for him as he was for Mello, but actually witnessing it kind of scared him.

The weeks of grubbing through dirty data, pruning his code like bonsai, paid off at last.

Mello arrived back at the house while Matt was flipping through the vacation photos of a young woman wearing a lemon-print bikini. He’d catfished his way into her Instagram via an account he’d populated with her manager’s sister’s Facebook pictures. In his profile, he’d put the emoji for Sagittarius, next to a unicorn emoji. Whimsical.

“Date?” asked Mello.

“Uh huh. What should I wear?”

“Something without holes? I’ll loan you something.”

“Fuck off. We got a girlfriend.”

“Thought the guy was married.”

“...Yeah, like I said. We got a girlfriend.” Matt clicked around until he came to a selfie of her and Abernathy, smiling cheek-to-cheek on some sailboat somewhere. The sunset was catching in their mingled hair—his salt-and-pepper, hers chocolate-brown—and their smiles were free and unguarded. It was a nice picture. Matt had no fucking idea what possessed Abernathy, a guy who had signed himself up for a lifetime of being on the run, to allow himself to be drawn in front of her phone camera, to be drawn into her life.

Maybe it was just that, eventually, surviving wasn’t enough. You had to survive for something.

Mello would probably put it differently. He’d say he’d gotten stupid. He wouldn’t be wrong about that.

“Her name’s, uh, Lana Martinez,” he continued. “Twenty-six, lives out on the west side, works at the H-E-B near the university. You want me to work on her?”

Mello looked neutrally at the photo. “I’ll do it. Take a break,” he added unexpectedly. “You look like shit.”

“Aw, thanks.”

Matt felt Mello’s hand land in his hair while he was hunched over, trying to wring some juice out of his near-empty lighter. The floor within a five-foot radius of his setup was littered with the carcasses of empty cigarette packs, like dried-up beetle husks. It had been a rough couple of weeks.

“Good job,” Mello said, ruffling a little.

Matt closed his stinging, dry eyes. Happy.

()

True to Mello’s order, Matt immediately passed out for nineteen hours, waking only in brief snatches as Mello went in and out of the apartment.

Near the end, he thought he might’ve felt the back of Mello’s hand on his forehead. Half-asleep, he turned, trying to trap it between his head and the overheated pillow. The hand laid still for a moment before slipping away. He slept again.

()

He woke up at 10:25 PM like a cicada breaking out of its shell. His mouth felt like he’d been drinking superglue. The air of the apartment was as stale as King Tut’s tomb was when they first cracked it open.

“This tastes so good,” he told Mello, sticking his head under the tap.

“... Water?”

“Yeah,” said Matt fervently. “Dude, what the fuck. What was I even eating? Did I fucking eat?”

“Sometimes. I’d just stick Capri-Suns and Oreos and things under your chin until you’d notice them.”

“Can we get a pizza? Can we get two? I could eat a horse.”

Responsibly, Mello ordered them a single large.

“This is mine,” said Matt defensively when it arrived, pulling the grease-soaked boat of dough and cakey marinara towards him. “This is all me.”

“You’re not eating that whole thing. You’ll puke—slow the fuck down, jesus. Chew, for fuck’s sake.”

Matt ate until his stomach hurt, and then couldn’t complain about it, because Mello would poke fun. He stretched out gingerly in front of the television, hands over aching belly, missing the look of affection Mello tossed him over the back of the couch.

Mello had spent these last six or seven weeks tending Matt like a houseplant. Misting him with Mountain Dew, getting him into the shower every couple days, making him take a vitamin D pill on the days he absolutely refused to get ten minutes of sun exposure. He liked it when Matt busted ass, because it gave him a concrete excuse for keeping him around. Meant that Matt could plausibly be considered one of Mello’s strengths, an asset, rather than his biggest weakness.

Matt got hot for Mello when he was bossy and mean. Mello got hot for Matt when he was competent and kickass. Also mouthy, but Matt was always mouthy.

Sensing Mello looking at him, Matt turned partway around, and Mello looked away so he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the part of him that wanted to bite his breath right out of his mouth.

“Take a nap with me,” Matt demanded.

Goddamnit. He fucking knew letting Matt get him off was a mistake. Give that boy an inch, he’d string you for a mile. “I’m not tired.”

“We could take a day off tomorrow.”

“Hilarious. I need to figure out what to do about that Martinez woman.”

“Okay, fine, can I at least have a day off? Boss?”

“To do what?”

“Uh, nothing? Sleep? Possibly smoke a joint?”

Just hearing about it gave Mello cabin fever. And the weed thing was a risk, since Matt would almost certainly try to peer pressure him into partaking, and that could only end unproductively for both of them. But Mello had no big tasks for him to work on. Anyway, he didn’t like the greasy shadows lingering beneath Matt’s eyes.

“Fine, but not if you have to get it from a dealer.”

“Yeah, yeah. S’fine. I bought some back in Dakota.”

Christ. Probably had it stashed in the glovebox the whole time. “And vent the room,” he added. “I hate how that shit smells.”

“Uh-huh, sure thing, boss.”

()

The next week passed like rain seeping into dirt. Matt slept no less than twelve hours a day. When he was awake, he alternated working his way through the Legend of Zelda and his skunky Dakota weed. Every night, he’d try talking Mello into splitting a spliff, to no avail. 

“One hit will literally not kill you,” he’d say, arms crossed over bare chest. Sometimes he took his shirt off so that Mello would be forced to argue against the headwind of Matt’s comfortable body and biteable, soft belly. This was his version of a siren call.

“No,” said Mello from the bathroom, ignoring him with ease. He stood in front of the mirror doing something elaborate to his hair. “That shit always gives me headaches.”

“You probably won’t even feel it.”

Mello hit him with a filthy look. This was a lie, and they both knew it. Mello had never had much of a tolerance.

The smell of his cologne arm-wrestled the smell of the weed.

Matt gave him the old up-and-down as he stepped out of the bathroom. He looked hot, if not entirely like himself. Mello never normally wore cologne. It put Matt off.

He looked like somebody’s idea of hot, anyway.

“Date?” he asked.

Mello barked a laugh, and left without another word.

Matt had only partially been trying to get Mello high in order to have sex with him. Partially, he really did think that Mello needed to fucking relax. Mello left that night and the next two dressed to the elevens; came back that night and the next two in foul fucking moods.

The third night, he didn’t come home at all.

Matt had never dared to ask whether Mello sometimes slept with people to gain information or blackmail. He might never. They had sex but didn’t talk about it.

Mello’s views on sex were fucked, maybe irreparably. There was a whole root system of damage there.

When they were kids, he used to sneak off and pray for so many hours his kneecaps bruised pitch-black. Then there was the brief period when he was about thirteen when he’d coasted into real dangerous waters: obsession with self-flagellation, mortification of the flesh, and all that. Matt remembered the morbid picture of Saint Sebastian that he tore out of an art history textbook and taped up on the wall next to his bunk. This all culminated in the crisis of Mello vanishing entirely for two weeks, his seat in class sitting empty every day while all the adults refused to say a goddamn thing about it. For several days, Matt teetered on the verge of home-cooking a bomb in the chemistry lab and threatening to blow the place to kingdom come if he didn’t get some news. He had got so far as ordering materials on Silk Road when Mello came back, looking pretty much the same as he always had, no more or less visibly damaged than he’d been before. But he never breathed a word of what had happened, not even to Matt. Still hadn’t, to this day.

Only much later did Matt piece together that Mello had also lost his virginity around this time. It didn’t seem like a coincidence.

Matt wasn’t normally prone to violent urges, but sometimes he got heated thinking about all this. Got to dreaming about sneaking into Vatican City and popping a cap in the Pope’s wrinkled ass. Fuck Papa Francesco and fuck Catholicism.

It was hard for Matt too, since the part of him that wanted Mello to be liberated and free with his sexuality battled constantly with the part of him that wanted Mello to quit sleeping around and belong solely to him.

The stench of alcohol, loud as a trumpet blast, woke Matt from where he’d dozed off on the couch. Mello was standing just inside the doorway, peeling his clothes off like they were on fire: shirt thrown in the entryway, pants tossed on the living room floor. The bathroom door closed; the shower thundered on. It was 4:50 in the morning.

Matt dozed. A half hour later, he snapped back awake when he realized the water was still running.

Mello leapt backwards when Matt peeled back one corner of the baby-blue shower curtain.

“Jesus—_fucking _ christ, Matt, I swear I’ll fucking kill you.”

Matt had checked beforehand that Mello’s Sig Sauer was out of reach, sequestered safely besides the sink. He wasn’t that stupid. “I thought you might’ve passed out,” he said.

“I don’t fucking black out. I know my fucking limits.”

_ Do you? _thought Matt. Since Mello was making no attempt to hide himself, Matt could see clearly the angry pink stripes where he’d scoured his skin so hard he’d brought blood to the surface.

Matt stared for a few seconds too long. Mello swiveled the shower head at him like turning a hose on a dog. The water blistered where it struck. “Get out,” he said, as Matt cursed, leaping back.

When Mello came out and saw him slumped determinedly at the kitchen table, holding his wet t-shirt off him with one hand, he ordered, “Go back to sleep.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

Matt shrugged. “I’m not that tired either,” he lied.

Mello’s seething mood expanded quickly to fill the entire apartment, sucking all the air out. Matt, regretting his decision to defy Mello but now way too nervous to go back to sleep, said hesitantly, “I’m gonna—”

He ducked into the bathroom, which was still wet with steam from Mello’s skin-boiling shower. This was where he always smoked, since the apartment had piss-poor ventilation. He slid its tiny window open and turned the fan on. Sitting on the floor, he put the toilet lid down and rolled a joint on the porcelain.

When Mello crowded his way in, Matt flinched a little. But all he did was hold one hand out, waiting for Matt to finish his inhale.

Twenty minutes later, they were both slumped on the floor: Matt shored up against the edge of the bathtub; Mello shored up on Matt’s shoulder. Matt knew they were pointy and uncomfortable, having been told by his ex. He was trying to get Mello to raise his head so he could slide a towel underneath as a cushion, when instead Mello picked up his head and kissed him.

Mello kept grabbing at random parts of him as they worked their way down onto the yellowing linoleum: fingers kneading into Matt’s shoulderblades and biceps, pulling at the little rolls of fat on his sides. Not even in a sexual way. More like he was checking Matt was whole. Matt grabbed back. He wished Mello could know what a comfort his body was to him.

It felt so fucking good to be allowed to hold him. Belly-to-belly, legs pretzeled together.

Mello clung to him like he wanted to crack a rib. His arms squeezed so tight around him that Matt had difficulty breathing. He mumbled something into Matt’s ear.

“—gross…”

“Huh?” gasped Matt. He was afraid to exhale too much. He didn’t think Mello would let him get a breath back in if he did.

Luckily, Mello began easing off into sleep a couple minutes later. He was dead to the world within ten minutes, knocked out cold by the crossfade. Matt carried him like a sack of flour into the bedroom. He arranged his slack limbs before lying down gingerly next to him.

His whole body was sore. It felt like he’d survived a minor car crash. Mello’s fingerprints ripened into bruises all over.

Matt had always thought he’d like for Mello to be as needy for him as he was for Mello, but actually witnessing it kind of scared him. It reminded him of the hours after he was shot. The clinging.

And what the fuck had Mello tried to say him, back there? Why the fuck would he never repeat any of that shit when sober?

In the dark, he prayed for the thousandth time that Mello would tell him what the fuck was going on.


	6. Odessa III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I do anything I have to. That’s what ‘have to’ means.”

Mello had clearly been sober enough to remember what happened, because he kept Matt at religious arm’s length for the next several weeks.

The goodwill that Matt had bought himself by identifying Lana Martinez had dried up. Mello had several leads, and Matt had shit, which meant Matt was shit, in Mello’s books.

It was hard to go back to being Mello’s tool, after Mello had granted him personhood on the floor of a low-rent Odessan bathroom. Stuck at the intersection, waiting for Mello’s red-light / green-light intimacy to blink back in his favor.

To top it off, Matt was also almost certain that Mello was screwing Martinez. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t just put a balaclava on, break into her house, pistol-whip her a few times and be done with it. But hey: Mello was the boss, the people person, called the shots. Matt was just the ops guy. What the fuck did he know?

The ops guy sat alone in the apartment, which lately had started to feel like a cage. He was suffering from a low-grade emotional cabin fever. Marinating in his shit mood, he spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia articles about climate change, CO2 sequestration, and the planet’s many, many endangered species.

“Did you know there’re only, like, four hundred Sumatran tigers left?”

“Hm?”

“Tigers. And there’s only _ eighty _ fucking Amur leopards. They’re totally fucked.”

Mello squinted at him, before asking, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Trying to develop a metaphor, Matt decided he felt like the world’s last northern white rhinoceros. In other words, the outlook wasn’t hot.

He opened Martinez’ Instagram again, flicking through her photos, guessing at how much of a beating she could take before she spat out Abernathy’s location like a bloody tooth. Still, Matt seesawed between cruelty and sympathy. He was self-aware enough to realize that he himself might one day end up in such a situation, vis-a-vis Mello’s criminal activities.

Matt had decided he was most afraid of getting his fingernails pulled out. Seeing it happen in films always made him shit a brick.

“Them’s the breaks,” he said out loud to Martinez’ frozen, frowning image. She stood stuck, leaning against a car fender with one middle finger up. Matt could relate. “Being a sidekick sucks,” he added.

Poor woman, caught unknowing on the wrong side of Mello’s ire. And she might not even know where Abernathy was.

After all, if Mello wanted to ditch Matt—would he hesitate to lie to him?

Contemplating this, Matt navigated to Amazon.com and ordered himself an electric handheld massager and a lavender car freshener. He’d been exploring new ways to destress.

He’d done something really stupid two days ago, which was to take his Ford Focus all the way up to 110 MPH on the freeway.

Driving was stress relief for Matt. His blood settled at the sound of an engine. He went to a lot of drag races, back in L.A. On summer evenings, he’d go down to Venice Beach and drive donuts with the Latino kids, who cheered the _ gringo _on in Spanish that he didn’t understand.

The sunset never looked as well as it did setting behind Mello’s blonde head in his passenger seat.

His little joyride only lasted ten or fifteen minutes, before his senses smacked back into him. Christ, how many cameras had he blown past? Didn’t Matt know better than anyone how easy that shit was to track? Paranoid, he dropped the car, picked up a new one for $850 cash that afternoon. He’d been waiting for Mello to comment on his new hunk-of-shit ride, but he hadn’t said anything. Probably approved of the caution.

Mello came into the apartment wearing a hectic paisley shirt and cowboy boots, holding Matt’s Amazon box under one arm.

“Oh, it came, nice.”

“Why do you keep buying shit?”

“Retail therapy. And I’m paying for all of it, before you get your panties in a twist.”

“With what money?”

Matt tore the packaging open with his teeth. “I sell pics of my body online,” he mumbled, spitting out plastic.

Mello ignored this, peering at the massager. “What is that, like a sex toy?”

_ Yes,_ Matt thought. _Use it on me ._ Out loud, he said, “Don’t be nasty. It’s just one of those shoulder massage thingys.” It vibed so powerfully in Matt’s hand when he hit the power that he nearly dropped it. It really did look like a sex toy, luridly purple and buzzing loudly.

“You wanna try?” he asked Mello.

The way Mello scrupulously avoided touching Matt’s hand when he handed it over kind of made Matt want to scream. He wanted to shove Mello down, strip off his stupid paisley, and run this obscene purple thing over his body until he begged Matt to make him come.

Mello held it calmly to his shoulder, one hand resting on his hip.

“Is it nice?”

“It’s okay.”

“Cute shirt,” needled Matt.

“Wasn’t my choice.”

“So like, does Martinez like paisley, or…?”

Mello’s voice got sharp: a warning. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Would you actually sleep with a girl? Like, if you had to.”

“I do anything I have to. That’s what ‘have to’ means.” Mello powered the massager off and threw it onto the table. “I’ve slept with girls before, Matt, so you can stop trying to pull that one over me. Mello, the poor little faggot, the little queer, could never get it up with a woman—”

“Hey, I never said that shit.”

“—maybe I enjoyed it. Maybe I’m enjoying fucking Lany Martinez.”

“Maybe you’re full of shit.”

His left fist in the hair at the back of Matt’s head hurt. He threw Matt at the floor. Matt didn’t try to get up.

“No? You don’t think so?” He was unbuckling his belt. Big fucking asshole buckle flashing in Matt’s eye. “You don’t smell this shit?”

Matt shook his head. Gone mute. Mello smelled like Mello. He sat up on his knees, good boy to Mello’s bad cop. When he opened his mouth to taste, it was watering a little.

“Well, she’s there, and it’s fucking disgusting. Clean”—Mello’s voice wavered a little as Matt took him fully on his tongue—gratifying shit—“it off,” he said.

Matt didn’t say anything else, since his mouth was full, but he thought, _ bitch, got there first. _

The rhythm of Mello’s body was well-known to Matt by now. He knew when to go harder and when softer, knew how to tease him. Still, when he pulled off one too many times, Mello got frustrated and tried to drag him in by the hair. Matt turned his head to the side and bit Mello in his non-scarred hip.

“Ow—fuck—”

“C’mere. Come—”

Matt pulled at Mello’s hips until he came down to the floor too. Lying back, he enjoyed the sight of Mello tearing down Matt’s jeans, and then his boxers. Only once Matt was ass-bare to the world did Mello deign to seat himself over one of Matt’s hipbones, pushing their dicks together and slicking his hand up and down both of them together.

“Oh, fuck, jesus,” said Matt. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows to watch, and Mello reached over without even looking up and pushed him back down. He kept his hand there, planted dead center in the hollow of Matt’s chest, leaning into Matt for balance as he shifted forwards over him. He was getting into it, eyes fluttering shut. Matt could feel his thighs twitching against Matt’s leg.

Mello paused briefly, fingers flexing. He was using his right hand, Matt realized.

“Here—lemme—”

They tilted so that Mello was on the floor and Matt the one straddling him. He was just starting to jerk him off when Mello slid his leg out from under Matt and tossed it over Matt’s shoulder. This particular move never failed to knock Matt’s breath out from under him. He would’ve pulled a muscle if he tried the same thing.

“Are you,” he said, and Mello said, “It’s fine.” Still, since Mello was a cocky shit who said he was “fine” whether he was or wasn’t, Matt worked a finger into him first.

Mello nearly bit his goddamn head off. “Motherfucker, I said it was fine, you don’t—”

When Matt pushed into him, Mello shut up with a groan. It might’ve been a little quick, but could you blame Matt, the way Mello was mouthing off?

Mello stayed shut up as Matt fucked him. He wasn’t noisy, when it came down to it. Matt was glad Mello had kept his shirt on, since Matt was inching him up the rough grain of the floor with his movements. He could feel Mello’s (still right) fist bumping into his stomach where he’d snaked a hand between them, touching himself.

Matt’s stamina was normally okay, but it had been a while. He had to keep taking his eyes off Mello and staring at a dusty corner of the apartment or some dirt in the tile grout in order to keep going, and even then he came before Mello, so quickly that he barely had time to pull out, and with the sheer force of a sucker punch. Mello came only seconds later, cheek pressed hard against the floorboard, his neck corded with tension and the little rut dug deep between his eyebrows.

Matt flopped onto the floor next to him. Well, he thought. God damn. He’d have jerked off beforehand if he knew Mello was going to throw this whole scene with him.

A couple decades later, he managed to sit up. Mello hadn’t moved an inch, arm thrown over his eyes. The sight of Matt’s own jizz pooled on the floorboard between Mello’s spread legs was filthy hot, nearly got Matt hard again.

“Does your arm hurt?” he asked. He knew he’d fucked Mello brainless when Mello conceded without hesitation, “Yeah.”

“Sorry. Can I do something?”

“No.” After a moment, he added, “It’s better when I’m busy. I can forget about it.”

“Oh,” said Matt. His heart shrivelled in shame in memory of all the nights he’d stared in mute hostility at Mello’s busy back, wishing he’d quit slaving away and pay attention to Matt. “I can get you a painkiller.”

“I had some already. I can’t get hooked on that shit.”

When he sat up, Matt saw that his shirt had rucked up. The exposed skin of his lower back was red and angry with friction. Before he could pull it back down, Matt lunged forwards and pressed his mouth against the damaged skin. “Sorry,” he mumbled into Mello’s back.

“It’s fine.”

When Matt didn’t move, he felt Mello sigh. Mello pulled his shirt partway down over Matt’s head.

Trapped in the dark between the taut fabric and the warmth of Mello’s body, Matt found the courage to say, “Hey.”

“Yeah.”

“Can we, like…” The words wouldn’t come. “Can we talk?”

“About?”

“No, I mean, like in general. Can we not ignore each other?”

“I didn’t think I was ignoring you.”

“I just. Shit isn’t the same.”

“The same as when? Italy?”

Matt shrunk at the callout. “Mm.”

“Things can’t be the same.”

“Okay.”

“After we get Abernathy, it’ll be better.”

This was the closest thing to a promise that Mello had ever given him. It wasn’t much, but it was probably all Matt was going to get.

“Yeah. Cool.” He took his head off Mello’s back, let him finish pulling his shirt down.

“You good?” Mello said to him, unexpectedly.

Matt smiled unevenly at him. “Doing better.”

()

The next morning started like any other.

Matt woke around noon. Mello was long gone, off to work or wherever. Matt went into the kitchen and ate handfuls of cereal dry, straight out of the box.

His fingers collided with plastic as he dug around, mining for pieces of marshmallow. Apparently kid’s cereal still came with prizes. The bag he pulled out contained a mood ring. It was too small to fit on anything but Matt’s pinky finger, where it shifted into a navy blue. The accompanying chart informed him he was feeling “loveable”. Loveable didn’t seem like a valid mood to Matt. Wasn’t that up to someone else to decide? He pried the ring off, dropped it on the kitchen counter. Maybe he’d wed Mello with it.

After breakfast was done, he puttered around the house doing pointless, stupid fucking shit.

He didn’t see the note until almost two hours later.

“**WAIT FOR ME IN LA**”

—it said. Nothing more.

Mello’s handwriting hadn’t changed at all. It was the same angry block lettering of his thirteen-year-old self.

He hurried around the apartment, checking. Mello’s shit was indeed gone. He traveled so light, it was hard to notice. Down in the parking lot, Mello’s car had also vanished, but he’d have dropped it by now, or at least changed the plates.

Matt cleared the house alone. Being forced to bin Mello’s hairs, wipe Mello’s fingerprints, and carefully erase every sign of him from their once-shared life was a whole new level of symbolic bullshittery that he really didn’t need.

He nearly took out a pedestrian as he floored his ancient Oldsmobile Silhouette out of the complex’s parking garage. He didn’t notice her flip him off. Matt was blind with rage.

Driving down the freeway, looking for motel vacancies, his life presented itself to him as a series of abandonments. First, his mom. Matt had been one of the few kids at the house who remembered their parents. Although he couldn’t really recall the last time he saw her; it must’ve been dropping him off at some aunt’s or cousin’s house. She was always doing that, the seven short years Matt had with her: always on and off the drugs, in and out of rehab, so that there was nothing special about the sight of her teal Honda Civic pulling away from him down a foreign driveway; the difference being, of course, that she never came back.

His relatives got sick of him, pawned him off to the house; he was miserable, considered dying, met Mello, was saved by him—and then Mello fucking ran away.

It took Matt five heart-stopping years to track him down. During those years, the locus of Matt’s lifelong loneliness, it was not an exaggeration to say that finding Mello was sometimes the only thing that kept him going. When he finally did—had survived walking into a mob lair with both hands up and throwing himself upon Mello’s favor—he swore he’d never let him out of his sight again.

Now Mello dared to try dismissing him like a dog to Los Angeles. The first time Mello left him, Matt wept for days. Now he was dry-eyed and fucking furious. Who the fuck did fucking Mello think he was. He wasn’t running out on some sad-eyed kid anymore; he was running out on a man who’d grown the hard edges and cunning that Mello required from him. Time and time again he’d tried to squash him into servitude, and hadn’t Matt resisted? Hadn’t he refused to be anything less than a friend to him?

Matt was never as certain of himself as when he was angry. He snapped his cigarette still-burning into the road.

Fuck Mello.

He opened his burner and went through Mello’s various numbers. He knew they wouldn’t work, but he was indulging in the fantasy where Mello picked up and Matt told him to go fuck himself.

“We’re sorry, the number you have reached is not available—we’re sorry, the number you have reached is—we’re sorry—”

Next, he dialed Rod one-handed.

“Rod. It’s me.”

“Yo, Matty.”

Matt hated this guy. He was a fucking tool. He couldn’t wait for when Mello would be boss.

“You know where Mello is?”

“Why, did you lose him?”

“If you know where he is, I need to know.”

“Man, like I keep track of him. Shit, I gotta hundred guys like him runnin’ around. I ain’t got time.” 

What a blowhard. Rod only had one of Mello, and he fucking knew it.

“‘sides,” he added, “I thought you did that.”

Matt gritted his teeth.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “Could you let me know if you hear anyth—”

“Yeah, yeah, I gotcha, man. Gotta go.” The douchebag hung up on him. Matt gave his darkened phone screen the finger before sliding it back into his pocket.

()

He spent two days shacked up in a Pepto-Bismol-colored motel off the 20, inspecting various traffic CCTVs, before the obvious occurred to him.

Lana Martinez was a tiny woman. Matt knew this from her photos, but it really hit home when she opened her front door and he found himself looking into the air above her head.

He adjusted his angle, so that they were eye to eye. The left side of her face was a rainbow of bruising, her lip split and one eye squinty from swelling.

Matt’s stomach swooped. Had Mello just been fucking with him, after all?

“Come in,” she said.

“What?”

She looked down meaningfully. Matt looked down too, and noticed the gun for the first time, pointed firmly into the soft skin of his solar plexus.

He raised his hands. “In,” she said.

She maneuvered him inside at pistol-point, closing the door without a sound.

“You armed?”

“No.”

“Open up.”

When he didn’t take her meaning, she snapped, “Your mouth, kid.” When he did, she rammed the first inch or two of the barrel between his teeth. “Hold that for a second,” she muttered, patting his waistband with one hand.

Matt tried to say “ow”, but since he was unable to close his mouth or lift his tongue from where it was depressed beneath the muzzle, it came out more like the “ahh” you gave at the dentist. He thought his tongue might have gotten cut. He couldn’t tell if the overwhelming metal taste was from blood or the gun.

Cross-eyed, he double-checked that the safety was off. It was. His throat grew warm, itched.

Martinez tucked Matt’s Glock into the back of her own jeans when she found it.

As soon as she took the gun out of his mouth, Matt spit on her floor.

“Do that again,” she said conversationally, “and I’ll shoot you in the knee.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to be rude or whatever. It’s just, like, is my mouth bleeding?”

She looked like she wanted to roll her eyes, although she didn’t. “Your friend in the ski mask warned me you’d come,” she said instead, as she backed Matt into her stove. “A redhead, he said.” She pointed the gun up briefly, gesturing at his hairline. “He certainly wasn’t lying about that.”

“I need to know where he went.”

“How should I know?”

“You told him something. And now he’s gone.”

“He told me he’d come back and kill me if I told you anything.”

“He’s not gonna do that.”

“You sound confident of that for someone who’s asking a lot of questions.”

The unwavering glare of the gun made the skin of Matt’s chest sweat. “Wait, so, like… Did he also tell you to shoot me? Or what?”

She shrugged.

“Fuck. That fucking mother _ fucker—” _

“Keep still, asshole.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing. It’s weird.”

He clamped his mouth shut on the “sorry” before it could come out.

“What _ are _ you, anyway? Some kind of accomplice, or what?”

Matt had to think about it.

Finally, he said, “I think I’m mainly just in love with him.”

“... Why in hell are you telling me that?”

Matt shrugged. Right then, he figured there was a non-zero chance he’d die on the floor of Lany Martinez’s kitchen. He thought about explaining that he’d never intended to go out with that secret still on his chest. When Matt died, he wanted to be gone, done for good. He didn’t need the karmic chain of his unconfessed love for Mello hung around his neck, binding him to a hundred or thousand or ten thousand more lifetimes of kicking around at Mello’s heels, like the moon circling the earth, bound by the gravity of longing.

It was too complicated. He gave up. “Please tell me,” he said instead, and then lapsed into silence. He’d run out of arguments in his favor.

The little woman and her gun considered him, silently.


	7. U.S. 380

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It wasn’t too late to defy the curse of the house he was raised in.

Matt ran a flat a dozen or so miles east of Roswell.

Being out on the road doing zero miles an hour instead of the usual ninety was totally disorienting. The road stripes stretched themselves out from yellow blips to twelve-foot-long smears. The letters on the nearby billboard advertising “PEA SOUP ANDERSEN’S: 153 MI” loomed several times taller than Matt. The gust of sixteen-wheelers whipping past kept putting out Matt’s cigarette. The noise was unreal.

Kneeling on the road, he started jacking up the car. The asphalt burned his knees. Within minutes, the handle of the jack was slippery with sweat. He had to keep stopping to wipe his hands on his jeans.

Fourteen hours lay between him and Salt Lake City. That was what Martinez had told him; that was where Mello was.

More, now that he’d busted his fucking tire.

The car’s frame inched up. Matt paused, wiped.

During the half-hour he was stopped, four cars and one motorbike stopped to offer help:

  1. An unwashed hippie couple
  2. A Swedish family out on holiday
  3. Two girls on a pre-college, last-hurrah road trip
  4. A female trucker chewing bubble gum
  5. The biker, grizzled and ancient as a bristlecone pine

“Where’re you headed, man?” asked the hippies.

“Going to Denver,” said Matt.

“Denver, it’s fun to visit there?” asked the Swedes.

“My ex-girlfriend’s there.”

“O-ooh, your  _ ex _ .” One best friend rolled her eyes at the other, leaned halfway out of the passenger window on her elbows as she lectured Matt, “Exes are bad news, y’know.”

He shrugged. “Not this one.”

The trucker squinted. “How d’you know y’all gonna stay together this time?”

“I guess I don’t,” said Matt.

The biker shook his head for a long time. “Young and foolish,” he said. “Young and foolish.”

Matt watched his Harley-Davidson roar away until it vanished in the heat haze coming off the road. He wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with him. People came here to change. That was the merit of this monstrous country which ate and ate towards the horizon. You could lose yourself somewhere in all those thousands of miles, roll yourself in the young earth and emerge pearl-like and new. Mello had done it. Only Matt stayed the same.

There was nothing stopping Matt from joining the dozens of cars passing every minute. He could walk along the highway, sticking his thumb out until he got a ride. He could turn west to L.A., east to England. Or he could go knock on his ex’s door, beg her forgiveness. He could go to college—MIT shouldn’t be a stretch. Then get a real job in Silicon Valley, or working for the CIA. His days could be ordinary, just like he’d dreamed, sliding by like unbroken water—weddings, births, illnesses, lawsuits, funerals. He could make his deathbed surrounded by his grandchildren. It wasn’t too late to defy the curse of the house he was raised in. Matt could live a long life.

These thousands of alternate realities did battle with the reality where Matt drove breakneck north, neck and shoulders stiffening into concrete, 5-hour Energies accumulating in the backseat, cursing every time he had to stop for gas, or the speed limit dropped, looking around for cops before leaning on the gas again. They faded quickly into the distance in Matt’s rearview mirror, before vanishing over the lip of the horizon.

He would run reds to reach him.

Same as it always was.


	8. Salt Lake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Also, I wish I felt like I could tell you this kind of shit more than every five hundred miles or ten years or whatever."

The forty-eight hours after Matt arrived in Salt Lake spiralled away in an unbroken fury of looking for Mello.

Matt even dipped into some of his personal stash of Adderall. He hadn’t taken any in years, not since they were kids and still living together at the house. Mello, back then still a bit of a brown-noser and a stickler for shit like grades and rankings, used to beg pills off Matt before exams. Matt didn’t give a shit about tests, but would invariably take some to keep him company. They would stay up together all night, twelve years old and wired to hell, Mello focused unblinking on his practice problems, Matt focused unblinking on irrelevant shit, like the sensation of different types of cloth under his fingertips, the texture of his hair where it brushed against his forehead, or the way his pulse sounded.

The sound of his blood rushing around his body was as loud as a superhighway through an open window. He pinched the shoulder of Mello’s shirt, fascinated by its slight furriness.

“What _ is _this?”

It took Mello nearly ten minutes to respond, he was so locked in. In the meantime, Matt slowly rubbed his shoulder, drawing patterns in the nap of the fabric.

“Suede. I think,” he finally said.

“Wow. Suede.”

“Uh huh.”

“D’you think I have an irregular heartbeat?”

“What the hell, Matt.”

“What? What if I have like, arrhythmia or something?”

“I can’t hear it,” Mello pointed out, and went back to his work.

Matt liked lording his stash over rule-abiding Mello, who at that time wouldn’t know how to buy drugs (pay teenagers on the outside to fake ADHD symptoms and give Matt their meds) if he had an instruction manual on how to do it. It was a long-running joke / ritual between them, Matt pretending to withhold the pills as Mello demanded them with variable levels of rage. Matt would make up terms that Mello carried out as his whims saw fit: I’ll give you one if you lock Isaac in the utility closet (fulfilled), if you steal Nilesh’s GameBoy for me (fulfilled), if you pants Roger (not fulfilled, on the grounds it was childish behavior and pointless).

One day, lounging on Mello’s bunk as Mello tortured some matrices into submission, Matt said, “You know, there is something you could do that I’d give you the whole thing for.”

“Get fucked,” Mello said promptly, wise to Matt’s game.

“Hmm,” Matt said, and waited.

Mello paused. Not wise enough. “What?”

Matt put his lips close to Mello’s ear, drenching him in his bad breath. “Kiss Near,” he whispered.

Mello straight up punched him. It hurt less than when he started hitting him with his sharp elbows. Those elbows were lethal. They, as well as Mello’s energetic kicks, had left many a bigger, older kid incapacitated. Mello was permanently banned from wearing hard-toed shoes. He had to go around all day in these T-strapped slipper-like things, like a little kid. God help the world on the day he got his hands on a pair of good boots. After he was grown, Matt never saw him in anything else.

“Ow! Ow! Crap! Stop it!”

Mello slapped him around the head one more time, then sat back, throwing his bangs out of his face. “I’d rather kill him.”

“You want to kill him all the time anyway. Have you kissed anybody before?”

“Have you?”

“I asked first.”

Mello’s well-ingrained Catholic shame struggled against the ordinary twelve-year-old boy who wanted to claim bragging rights. “Obviously,” he settled on answering.

“That’s total BS. Who? Linda?”

Mello scoffed. “As if. Linda’s a witch. I’m not telling you who.”

“Why not?”

“You’d be jealous, because you’ve never even kissed anyone before.”

“Says who?”

“What color was their hair?”

“Uh, bl-... Brown?”

Mello rolled his eyes. “I’ll kiss you, if you give me the whole thing.” He glanced sideways at Matt and immediately followed this up with, “It’s not weird. I just feel bad for you.”

It was definitely weird. Mello was just too freaky and ill-socialized to know better. Luckily for him, Matt was equally clueless.

Mello thought he’d called Matt’s bluff, and was unprepared when Matt eyed his mouth and said cautiously, “Okay.”

Backpedalling, Mello cautioned him, “Are you sure? You can only have one first time.”

Matt, non-Catholic and unconcerned with the holiness of firsts, shrugged and said, “It’s whatever. It might as well be with you.”

Full-blown panic lit in Mello’s throat. “Brush your teeth first,” he ordered.

Matt brushed.

“Your breath still smells.”

Matt took out his Altoids tin, in which he also kept the Adderall, plus various other illicit substances. Weeding aside the meds, he took two mints.

Then Mello ran out of excuses. They were both locked in.

Matt sat up cross-legged, his back against the wall, since he didn’t want Mello to have to crawl over him. Mello knelt on the bed in front of him. His body weight made Matt slide a little towards the dent he made in the mattress. They were both nervous, both trying to not show it. “Don’t stare,” Mello snapped at him at the last second. Obediently, Matt closed his eyes.

In the darkness beneath Matt’s bunk, their mouths met unexpectedly, like strangers bumping elbows on a train platform.

The kiss itself was unspectacular and dry. Matt’s main impression wasn’t of Mello’s mouth, but of the closeness of Mello’s face, of all of him. His best friend took on unfamiliar textures at this range: faint sunspots, pores, veins under skin, delicate as riverbeds. A certain scent rose from him, the same that he’d have for the rest of his life, and that Matt would eventually learn to associate with home. It was intimate.

Mello had started with his arms crossed tightly, but now he’d put one hand on Matt’s shoulder for balance. The gentle pressure of his fingers was so different than the hitting he’d done two minutes prior. Matt got real hung up on the contrast. He kept thinking about it, for days afterwards.

()

All of this came back to Matt as he was waiting for one of his scripts to finish running. The Adderall had sharpened his hazy childhood memories to a knifepoint. They dragged along his arms, around his neck, hand-in-hand with the vague fear that Mello was already dead.

On screen, the script convulsed, spat out a blob of text, and fell silent.

()

Matt came into the apartment with his gun drawn. The guy on the couch was simultaneously pot-bellied and scrawny, youngish but already going a little bald at the crown of his head. He didn’t look up, just like Matt used to never look up. Should’ve listened to Mello, Matt thought, leveling the gun at his chest.

“Yo, m—” The guy froze, eye-to-eye with Matt.

“Where is he?”

The guy put his hands up. “Out. You’re Matt.”

His slightly awed tone was irritating. “Fuck do you know about it?"

“You’re Mello’s people. Everyone knows that.”

“Who’s everyone?”

“I dunno, man. People. I’m just saying. You wanna put that thing down? We’re on the same side.”

Matt gestured with the gun at the door. “Get out.”

“That what Mello said to do?”

“Fuck Mello. I’m telling you to get out.”

“Aight, dawg. Chill out. I just work for him.”

Matt didn’t appreciate the implication of that. Christ, did Mello go around telling everyone they slept together? Or was it just that fucking obvious? “So do I,” he shot back.

The guy gestured at his setup. “Can I at least—”

“Dude. Out.”

Thrown out on his ass in the hallway, he lodged one final complaint, the only one that really mattered: “He’s not gonna like this.”

Matt closed the door on him. He wandered around the apartment as he waited. Only one bed, he noted critically—but he didn’t think Mello sprung for guys with thinning hair. Gave him less to pull on.

The phone rang in less than five minutes. Matt let it go to voicemail.

Mello’s voice threatened the silence.

“Pick up, dickhead. I know you’re there.”

Just hearing him made Matt happy.

“Chen literally just called me. That’s the first time anyone’s pulled a gun on him, by the way. He feels like a real criminal now.”

Matt’s own hair was crazy thick and unruly. It formed unpredictable sculpturesque shapes every morning when he woke up, and would remain flattened on one side in the shape of his pillow if he didn’t move it around.

Matt ran his fingers through it, satisfied. He went back over to the phone. Crouching, he laid his head on the table next to the voice machine, so that it sounded like Mello was speaking into his ear.

“Chen knows about you. That’s understating it. He’s so fucking obsessed with you. Geeking out 24/7 about your cool hacker exploits.” Mello yawned obnoxiously, in that jaw-popping way of his. “I had to suck his dick just to get him to pay—”

Matt hit the answer button. “Where the hell’d you find him, the graduate department of UC Berkeley?”

“Why the fuck are you here, Matt?”

“Did you really blow him?”

“You called _ Rod _about me, motherfucker?”

“Did you?”

“Jesus christ. Ask where I am.”

“Where are you?”

“Abernathy’s house.”

“Oh, wow. Shit.”

On the other end of the line, Mello sat back and let the silence spread.

This was the third or fourth time Matt had come face-to-face with the fact that Mello was a murderer. Most of Matt’s unease came from how okay he was with it, when it was Mello on the killing end.

Matt never knew how to react when Mello slapped this kind of shit down in front of him. He felt like saying something wildly inappropriate, some stupid joke like _ so, tell me what you’re wearing. _

Instead, he asked, “What’re you doing?”

“Making tea. And calling you.”

Matt pictured him boiling water in the dead man’s kettle. Maybe he had his boots up on the body or something. Feeling badass, blood wild, hair a little messy. Mello got dramatic when he was in a good mood.

“So it, uh, went well?”

There was a pause where Mello shrugged. “He’s dead. I shot him in the neck. It’s pretty exploded.”

“Cool.”

“I’ll show you the photos later.”

“Please don’t.”

“They’re gnarly.”

“I don’t really want to see them, man.”

“What’d my arm look like when it got shot?”

“... gnarly.”

“Does it trouble you?”

“Uh, yeah, it fucking troubled me when I, like, thought you might die.”

“An arm isn’t that big of a deal.”

“It looked like a big fucking deal, okay, Mel? At the time? Like when I was stuck in the hospital waiting for like three fucking days? Like, you weren’t even that awake for it, so don’t tell me whether it was or wasn’t. It was a big deal.”

“Alright, alright, jesus. Sorry for freaking you out.”

“Okay.”

“I thought you’d be safer if you were back in L.A.”

“You got shot in L.A.”

“I mean if you weren’t with me.”

“Oh,” said Matt.

Mello sighed. “We need to talk.”

“What, uh, what exactly—”

“Don’t go anywhere.”

“—does that mean? Mel?”

“I’m coming back. Two hours.”

“I don’t think I really wanna talk,” Matt said, but he was wasting his breath. Mello had hung up already.

()

Mello caught up with him in the middle of Temple Square. Matt was standing in a group of ten or so people, hands in his pockets and looking around absentmindedly as a woman in a sundress and a floppy hat lectured at them.

Everyone tried not to stare when Mello marched up, took Matt ungently by the elbow, and dragged him a couple feet to the side.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed under his breath.

“Taking a tour,” Matt said placidly.

“I told you to fucking wait.”

“Yeah, I guess you’ve told me that a couple of times. Did you know this is the world’s largest Mormon temple?”

“I couldn’t give a shit.”

“Aw, babe,” said Matt loudly, and kissed him ferociously, planting a hand on each shoulder so he couldn’t run, sliding his tongue into Mello’s stunned, angry mouth. He pivoted, grinned brightly at the frozen tour group. “My boyfriend’s here.”

Inside the Tabernacle, Mello double-checked no one was looking before lifting the back of his jacket an inch and touching his waistband where the grip of his Sig Sauer sat.

He mouthed at him, “I’ll fucking kill you.” Matt mouthed back, “So do it, bitch.”

Tricking Mello into spending the first overheated forty-five minutes of their reunion in public was a brilliant tactical move on Matt’s part. Forced to hold Matt’s hand and act civil, he was prevented from doing foolhardy things, like getting into a shouting match with Matt or telling him to fuck off, forever.

Afterwards, Mello sprawled out on a bench across the street, eating donuts Matt had bought them. He’d gotten over his pissiness and gone back to feeling good about the killing he’d delivered. He felt like the Lord’s unjust left hand, the merciless messenger of God. Killing put Mello into control of somebody’s life, if not his own. Good enough.

He took a small digital camera out of his back pocket. Powering it on, he held it up, showing Matt the grey, slack face of Jack Abernathy suspended above a pink orgy of shredded flesh.

“Oh, sick,” said Matt, before bending over to the side and vomiting.

“Jesus!”

“Sorry. You can have the rest of the donuts.”

Mello handed him a napkin. “You’re so not cut out for this,” he said, as Matt wiped his chin.

“Maybe if you didn’t just spring this shit on me out of nowhere.”

“So are you ready now, or what?”

Matt groaned, shoving the camera away from him. “I puked so much when your thing happened,” he confessed in a rush. “I’ll still puke if, uh, like if I think too hard about it.”

“When would you throw up?”

“Whenever. You were out a lot.”

“Sorry it was such an inconvenience for you,” Mello said stiffly.

“No, I don’t mean—like, I wasn’t trying to get you to apologize. You don’t have to fucking apologize for fucking getting shot, man. It just. Shit affects me, you know?”

“Okay.”

Facing resolutely forwards, Matt added, “Also, I wish I felt like I could tell you this kind of shit more than every five hundred miles or ten years or whatever. If I could tell you when shit sucks, and like, you could tell me. Like it wouldn’t solve anything? Necessarily? But I think it’d be better. Yeah. I think it’d be kind of cool.”

When Mello didn’t respond, he prodded, “Were you ever going to come back to L.A.? If I’d gone there?”

Mello sighed. “Yeah,” he admitted, realizing himself that it was true as he said it. He couldn’t bring himself to get rid of Matt, not yet. “Not ever” would be a different story, a crisis for a later time. He’d burn that bridge when he got there.

Beneath the leather sleeve of his jacket, his arm itched but did not hurt. Didn’t meant it wouldn’t. Shit was still healing. The bullets had taken Mello down a notch. He would have to be human, at least a little while longer.

“Nice,” said Matt, relieved.

“But I can’t be everything for you,” he countered.

“Uh, rude.”

“I’m serious, Matt. When we go back, shit needs to be different. You have to figure out how to be your own person.”

Matt crooked a finger inside the neck of Mello’s t-shirt. “Yeah, no, it’s all cool, man. Just don’t fucking leave anymore.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it. Wouldn’t you just hunt me down, anyway?”

“Probably. But shit’s tiring.”

They sat in silence for a while. They were both realizing how exhausted they were, now that the adrenaline had worn off. Soul and body were weary. Their long manhunt was finally over.

Matt shifted uncomfortably on the metal slats of the bench. “So now what?” he asked.

“We go back to the apartment and I take a long fucking nap.”

“And then?”

“Then we go back to L.A. I’ve had about enough of this place.”

“But like before that?”

“Before that what?” said Mello shortly, losing patience.

“Don’t you wanna celebrate?”

“What do you want, a cake?”

“I wouldn’t mind a cake. Or we could maybe, uh, get blackout drunk, and then…?”

Mello snorted at Matt’s waggling eyebrows. He was such a kid, sometimes.

But it was fun, later, after he’d had his nap, when he had a lapful of him on the couch, a mouthful of liquor and a fistful of hair. Mello had to admit that much.


	9. Los Angeles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Would you ever wanna get married?”
> 
> Mello paled. “Jesus, Matt.”

Christmas eve found Matt and Mello sitting in a restaurant in Chinatown. Mello was eating cumin lamb noodles, Matt a huge platter of shrimp fried rice. Their second pitcher of beer lay warm and abandoned on the table, marooned in an ocean of the fly-green bottles of soju that Mello liked.

Matt watched Mello refill his glass without protest. He was pretty much tapped out already, but Mello didn’t like drinking alone, and being wasted made Matt more helpless than usual to the bratty upturn of the cupid’s bow of Mello’s lip.

Backlit by the restaurant’s cheap holiday lights, he looked like an angel.

The angel snapped his fingers in front of Matt’s face.

“Are you blacking out?”

“‘M’okay.”

“Don’t black out.”

“Stop making me drink, then.”

Mello slid him a pitying look and a glass of water. Matt drank half of it before excusing himself to the bathroom for the fourth time. Taking a leisurely piss, he eyed the miniature Christmas tree stood in the corner of the room. Its white plastic branches bristled with surfing Santa ornaments. Their tackiness was bewitching.

He filched one on his way out, and showed Mello.

“Dude, look at this thing I found.”

“Ugly.”

“I dunno, I think it’s kind of cute, in a gross way. Very L.A.”

“Happy to be back?”

Overjoyed. “Pretty happy,” he said.

Mello knocked back another shot. “Ten fucking months,” he sighed. “Fuck Rod for sending us out. Next time I’ll tell him he can go straight to hell before I step foot any-fucking-where. He can get one of the new kids to do the damn fieldwork.”

This was Mello’s roundabout way of apologizing for their year-long tour of flyover country. He could’ve just said “Sorry, won’t happen again,” but he never could communicate without teeth. 

Matt rolled his eyes. “Wow, dude, awesome. You talk mad shit for somebody who’s not, uh, technically the boss of anybody yet.”

“Patience.”

“Well, I guess you’re already mine.”

“Mm-hm. You’re my first subordinate.”

“That’s kinda sexy.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, like, you can workplace harass me anytime. I won’t sue.”

Mello snorted. Matt was such a geek. It was unfair that he had fallen for him in any capacity. 

When he got up to pay the bill, the room dipped around him. He grabbed Matt’s shoulder for balance. Without looking up from the ornament he was surfing across the table, Matt crooked his elbow and threw his hand over Mello’s, squeezing.

Mello paused, stunned. Usually Matt was too nervous and humble to lay claims on him in public. He kind of liked this confident boy who slung his hands over Mello like he was his—if only so he could put him in his place later. Something to look forward to.

Back at the table, he slid Matt’s soju glass out of reach.

“Come to Mass with me.”

“Uh-huh,” said Matt. He looked like he hadn’t heard a word of what he’d said. Too busy staring at Mello, like worshiping. It would’ve been skin-crawling if Mello wasn’t drunk, too. As it was, Mello just felt protective. He wanted to tell him to put his feelings away; didn’t he know it was dangerous out there? Like walking around with your wallet hanging out of your pocket, fuck’s sake.

()

Matt wouldn’t let Mello climb into the driver’s seat of Matt’s vintage Roadrunner, no matter how many promises he made that he would drive slow. In the end, they walked the fourteen blocks to Mello’s church.

Matt’s buzz worsened as they went, so that when they arrived he was overwhelmed by the swaying lights, the cross that blazed against the velvet night, and the crush of conversation, orange and pulpy, at the door. It reminded Matt of showing up to a club he was underdressed for. Of course, Mello was underdressed too, but he made it work.

“Is it cool that we’re going to this drunk?” he asked, feeling self-conscious.

“Say that a little louder, why don’t you,” snapped Mello. He took him by the shoulder and shoved them both in with his elbows. The air inside was humid with people and thick as wax. Matt gasped like a landed fish on the pew where Mello threw them. The woman sitting on his left shrunk away from him, pulling her pillbox hat into her lap.

Matt had never been inside a church before, other than as a tourist in Italy. American churches were a lot uglier. Matt took out the little book affixed to the back of the pew and panicked when he saw staffs of music printed inside.

“Dude,” he hissed. “We have to sing?”

“Don’t worry, everybody’s shit at it.”

“I don’t know how to sing. I don’t know what to do.”

“Do what everyone else is doing. Or just sit. Nobody’ll care.”

Matt looked longingly at the exit. “Is there a bathroom?”

“Just hold it in.”

“I might puke.”

“Don’t.”

“Everything’s kinda moving,” said Matt miserably. The room bucked around him, like the pew was a mechanical bull.

Mello put his hands on both sides of Matt’s face, and pulled him towards him until they were nearly nose-to-nose. Matt watched his left pupil dilate as the shadow of Matt’s cheek fell over him; dilate further as his eyes proscribed tiny arcs across Matt’s face.

“You’re okay,” he said.

_ Yeah,  _ Matt thought. He wanted Mello to never move.

Bringing Matt was a mistake. He fidgeted, sweated alcohol, stared lovingly at Mello, kept touching his thigh, threatened to light smokes, and half an hour in, started trying to eat the leftover fried rice out of the takeout container in his lap until Mello kicked him in the shin. At least he didn’t throw up.

When the ordeal was over, Mello turned to him and said, “Good fucking lord.”

“Amen. Hey, I bet there’s something you’ve never done.”

“Were you trying to be on your worst behavior? This isn’t a movie theater. You can’t just start snacking whenever you feel—”

“I bet you haven’t gotten laid in a church before.”

“Wow. Terrifically mature.”

“So you haven’t.”

“Would you shut the fuck up?”

“I’d do you in a church. Like,  _ any _ fuckin’ time.”

“Very threatening proposal; I’ll make sure to watch my ass on Sundays. Is there anyplace you wouldn’t?”

“Do you? Eh… Nah, probably.”

In the church’s dark side alley, Matt shoved up against him like a stray cat. Predictable; not unwelcome. Mello scratched his nape. His skin was hot with alcohol, his body clumsy and eager. His knee banged into Mello’s thigh; his shoulder clipped him in the chin. He laughed when Mello cursed and attempted to shove him into a better position. It was like trying to punch water; Matt kind of just flowed back onto him, heavy as fuck.

“How’re you this fucking wasted?” Mello wheezed.

“Sorry. I feel like I’m melting.”

He levered himself off Mello, fumbling around in his pocket. Mello thought he was going for a condom—ambitious, considering the state he was in—but what he took out was something else entirely, something small and shining.

“Would you ever wanna get married?”

Mello paled. “Jesus, Matt.”

“What?”

“You just—this is—fucking spooky.”

“Why’s it spooky?”

“Sketchy movements, dark alleyway. Sudden invasion of personal space,” said Mello drily, checking off points on his fingertips. “Makes me feel like I’m getting mugged.”

“Aw, what d’you want, roses?”

“Fuck roses; a little light couldn’t hurt.” Mello’s voice was tight. He was scared to death that Matt was going to kneel.

“So?”

“Are you fucking for real right now?”

“Could you, uh, stop being a little bitch and just answer the question? Please?”

“What the hell is that anyway? Some toy?”

“Yeah, I got it from a cereal box.”

“Jesus christ. Buy a real ring.”

“Whatever.” Finally, Matt put the thing back in his pocket, and Mello was able to breathe easy again. “I didn’t say I was asking you to marry me.”

“And I’m just giving you general life advice,” he shot back.

But later, while he was easing the Roadrunner down the street to the background music of Matt’s menacing to end him if he put a single scratch on its tender steel undercarriage, Matt started up again.

“So, like actually, what kind of ring do you like?”

Mello sped up slightly in a subconscious attempt to get away from this conversation. He decided to put a bullet in it. “I’m not going to get married,” he told him.

“Why not? ‘Cause you like guys?”

Mello sped up some more. Matt was so goddamn insolent. Some days he wandered over your borders like a tourist on a day hike, oblivious. These were worse than the days he’d show up with intention and a hammer and smash your goddamn door down if you didn’t answer the bell. At least he tried on those.

Unconcerned, he continued on, “I think you should get married, if you want. Like, fuck the church or whatever, you know?”

Christ give him strength. He thought to let Matt know that the only thing keeping him alive was the depth of Mello’s affection for him. He didn’t. Threats didn’t stick to him.

Matt stuck his fingers through the rips of Mello’s jeans. Touchy, seeking approval. Mello settled back down.

“I’m fingering you,” Matt laughed to himself—the same stupid joke he’d been making since he was thirteen, when Mello started wearing edgy pants that Matt could dip his hands into. He craned backwards in his seat. “Also, just FYI, there’s a cop following us.”

“It’s fine,” said Mello, as blue light blared over their car. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

He pulled them over, rolled down his window. He showed the cop his ID, and then something else, said something that Matt didn’t catch. The cop fucked off immediately.

Matt watched the squad car pull away obediently onto the road. Sirens off, claws retracted.

“So, is this gonna be how it is now?” he asked him.

“Pretty much,” said Mello. The LAPD grunt was already in his rearview and seemed like nothing special to him. He wanted to threaten the chief of police and the attorney general. Someday, maybe even the president.

Back at home, the budding gangster made grilled cheese sandwiches, which Matt considered the height of luxury because Mello was capable of browning bread without charring holes into it, and because he used the kind of cheese that didn’t come pre-sliced.

They ate some in front of the TV, half-watching a late-night talk show, and took the rest out onto the balcony in the balmy night, fat with smog. Matt finished them off, sobering up gradually. 

Mello held a book in his lap, turning a page now and again as he thought other thoughts. He was in a serious mood, like he usually was after his weekly confrontation with his Savior. He considered whether it was his duty to marry Matt. Matt, who had given and given, without making any other real demands on him. On the one hand, Mello couldn’t imagine himself marrying anyone else. But on the other, he couldn’t shake the feeling that doing this would doom Matt somehow.

Half of his nightmares since he got shot were of Matt getting hurt. The image of him suffering the extreme bodily violation of a hollow-point made Mello nauseous. He never wanted him to know that kind of pain. Marrying him would be the opposite of a kindness.

Matt licked his fingers in a way that demanded Mello’s attention. “You are thinking so loud right now, man,” he said. “I bet you’re, like, calculating the optimal number of people to stab to establish dominance if you ever get sent to prison.”

“Just one,” said Mello. “But the important thing is that he’s got to be the toughest one.”

“Don’t go to prison.”

“You’ll find someone else to make you grilled cheeses.”

“No, I won’t.”

“What’ll you do if I go to jail, actually?”

“Sit around and pick my nose? Jailbreak you? I dunno. I’m not like you, man. You’re always thinking like a hundred years out or whatever.”

“And you’re just drifting along.”

“I don’t drift when I can’t drift. I mean, if I have to break you out of jail, I’ll do it.”

“What if it’s a supermax?”

“Jesus, what are you planning to do that you’re gonna end up in a supermax?”

“I have some stuff laid out.”

“Fuck. Sure, I guess I’ll break you out of goddamn Pelican Bay, if that’s what it takes.”

“Takes to do what?”

“You know.”

Mello did. Matt’s laxity itched at him like an old scar. “If you don’t plan ahead,” he said, “shit gets the better of you.”

“Shit happens anyway,” Matt countered. “Shit literally always happens. That’s life. It’s a big sea of crappy old unavoidable shit that you gotta swim through, but sometimes there’s like, little islands of niceness. And I just happen to think, you gotta enjoy them when you get to one, ‘cause you don’t know when the next one’ll come around. So sue me.”

“But if you’re prepared going in, you could build a boat.”

“You build the boat,” said Matt. “I’ll sunbathe.”

“Fuck! Your fucking—”

“Sorry.”

“—hands are freezing, fuck.”

He had stuck one of his hands suddenly down the back of Mello’s shirt. Matt had poor circulation. There was only so much Mello could do to warm them, outside of getting Matt active. He watched Matt scoot his chair towards him. Of course, getting him active was always an option.

Back inside the apartment, the television played on to an empty room. A news bulletin: across the ocean, a string of criminals had died under mysterious circumstances; the initial autopsies suggested heart attacks, although of course that couldn’t be correct.

Mello was right. Their future was coming for them.

Or maybe it was Matt who was wise, to insist on the moment. Considering how it all turned out—yeah, he was probably the smart one.

Outside, Matt crawled into his lap. Thoughts ceased. Mello’s book fell to the floor, one page open.


End file.
